Mark Tardi

from "Attribution Error"

“If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these
bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain.”
–Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

As ridiculous as writing a postcard to her cat
these were bodies like mismatched socks
a kind of furniture
no more holdable than the wind
frying onions, diesel oil, the sea itself
waiting to carry out the inevitable
or a hundred other lies
like the moon
like intestinal love
 
howling across the zero between waking and sleep
 

the same cross-ply screwdriver
with the weight of a table over their heads
interconnecting tubes, tubes respected or
distorted, curiously cut open, inflected
outside the bare acoustics
in soft-shoe trance
its neural depths, its stages, layers and folds

---

from "Attribution Error"

You sleep everywhere, in the ashes, under the
kitchen sink, the bar stool, frayed quilts,
small ridges and spines that contort into
outgoing roads of their liking
just as easily vegetable or mineral
floating through bandied shadows

neither hero nor insect,
a series of timed cries, stumbles
hard-pressed to preserve dignity
the pulse drum of the irrevocable act

--
Mark Tardi is originally from Chicago and he earned his MFA from Brown University. His publications include the books The Circus of Trust, Airport music, and Euclid Shudders. He guest-edited an issue of the literary journal Aufgabe devoted to contemporary Polish poetry and poetics and has translated poetry from the Polish by Kacper Bartczak, Miron Białoszewski, Monika Mosiewicz, and Przemysław Owczarek. A former Fulbright scholar, he lives with his wife and two dogs in a village in central Poland and is on faculty at the University of Łódź.