Grace
… first fruits of mountain meditations…She’s
grown up with that bas-relief above
her closet door. Paint all faded away, wood
spotted and split; it still causes her to weep…too much
alive to be confined within pages…In the lounge, the
couple gaze, out wall-length windows, down to an
unfamiliar boulevard streaked with rain and setting
sunlight…lying down in graves almost side by side…Study
to be loud; study to be silent…return expected
hourly…Listening to that Schubert lieder; wondering where
the melody comes down through, up through…brief
descriptions, yet a lifetime is not enough to digest them fully…
Smilingly
As in, burst. As in, onto the scene. As
in, better than not. As in, begging
that question…who is he…Those
subterranean, homogeneous years finally
pay off. Notations on a cancelled check
cause despair …600 desperate men with
their protection racket…Hiking up in the
cold to the stone quarry saves their entire
day…a mental Rubicon…Rudiments of
muteness required; insignia of buoyancy
optional…out-and-out zealot who
considers other countries painful
mistakes…Before the processional, they
shortened all their robes…its author
perhaps a singer since it only warms up when
dealing with the temple of music…
Telos
Especially giddy today, those
pamphleteers…driven to letter writing…Glad
he’s their very own thief. Predatory
tongues… He holds the killers’ outer garments
as they proceed…She adduces her losing
lottery ticket as evidence. They eschew
stratagems for unfolding…the images guild
became alarmed at their lack of sales…She recalls
collapsing as soon as that boundary
shifted. Habitual blunder — extolling
consciousness… as deadly to rise above
the standards of society as to fall below them…
Joel Chace has published work in print and electronic magazines such as Tip of the Knife, Eratio, Otoliths, Word For/Word, Golden Handcuffs Review, New American Writing, and The Brooklyn Rail. His full-length collections include matter no matter, from Paper Kite Press, Humors, from Paloma Press, Threnodies, from Moria Books, fata morgana, from Unlikely Books, and Maths, from Chax Press. Underrated Provinces is due out from Mad Hat Press in 2024. For more than forty years, Chace was a working jazz pianist. He is an NEH Fellow.