used to these stories

“Remember the pears, they were so green,

and the avocados, like guitars, honey-golden, and

the asparagus, like a lion’s rainy mane, and…”

Our mouths water. Their mouths water,

I am used to these stories. I am used to the land

barren, bitten and aflame with lies. I am used to

our faces in this new wild dispassionate light.

I learned this from my musician friends, from

years waging futile wars with poetry until

I could no longer think of anything else.

—Juan Felipe Herrera, “I Walk Back Nowhere,” Half of the World in Light (Univ. of Arizona Press, 2008)

blasted into little pieces

Prior to The Great War (WWI), Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis put out their Vorticist magazine aggressively called BLAST. After the war they were publishing in The Little Review. The titles of the two publications are telling: Nothing like the reality of trench warfare to put one’s art into perspective.