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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
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      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
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      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
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      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
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      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
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    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
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      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
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  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
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      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
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  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
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      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
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    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
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      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022

Seth Abramson

The Something Else


Chess is a score for music. Love is a score
for an original twisting.

There are twenty-nine people in the room
and all are in love 

but they don’t know. They’re discussing it
anyway. (Everyone in this conversation
is saying the same thing--
it’s a conversation with adaptation.) Is this

                  my implied contribution?
Even the repetition fails

as a repetition, and I keep trying to figure
the something else,
but if you think about instances of rising
heat, or art, and they seem contradictory,


they are structured. When one has a target,
being in a body,
aiming, like this,
at several options standing at an open bar,
and there is some spectral security

lining the walls, wearing the cheap blazers
they do,
                  what occurs?
There is an image of the body provided
by the spray of ordinary skill. I am still
in love
                  with a person not in this room,
but I do not want to leave where I am.
Therefore,
                  I attempt to repeat the repetition
of the sense,
of myself,
and I sweat as though a significant force
has been applied to me, and I begin
to raise possibilities
to someone who is standing near me
and who has also stopped moving entirely.




Samaritans


If there is an uninterpretable cry in the City,
if there is just one suffering,
there will also be men and women
going to homes,

and heavy breathing, but also light breathing,
and smothering, sometimes smothering.
Then a little mirror. But it takes so long
for anyone to get there,

                anywhere the ground lifts
and the roots pull, that however ordinary
the music in the streets,
still these men and women must move
into the way of things—

                the passages, the portals, the arrivals

they must repeat. It is this understanding
they have of poverty, of the poor in any way,

                because in time
the poor do bring their masters toward them.
Into the underground, in the new season,
the wind, a changing of positions,
and who is going
to read it? (Something that happens when
one is in close contemplation
of the ordinary.) To us there is much praise-
worthy in this city, in their women,
in their men, in their moaning in any way,
but I wonder, anyway,

                what the answer is for those people
in the way of things, for that sight
only some of them or us must ever attend to.




Footnote: “Something Else” and “Samaritans” are centos composed of two-, three-, and four- word phrases from a series of lectures on avant-garde literature delivered by University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Emeritus Cyrena Pondrom in 2012. No more than six single-word substitutions were permitted per cento.



--

Seth Abramson is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Thievery (University of Akron Press, 2013), winner of the 2012 Akron Poetry Prize. Series Co-Editor for Best American Experimental Writing (Omnidawn, 2014), he is currently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at University of Wisconsin- Madison.

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  • Home
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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022