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Two Poems by Felipe Gaston Muñoz

The Drop Keels, Book One, IX

interred ~ Hannah Porter’s four,

Samuel Williston, four girls, none

past six, Lucretia’s firstborn, Mary

Newman, “low among

the silent” threescore -

lampen streak, no tavern that night,

she primed + lightning “the fire,”                               

Lavinia’s streak across cloud such dark,

whatever flame sent her abroad, vastly,

but brought stiff planks rekindled,

Squire’s proceeds, ruined, things

public, still doused them ~ revived,

not him ~ even for such fevers as

struck the pious that season, for

that elected dawn flutters the

cardinal over her narrower wood,

Martha Ann Graves, read that still

in Sabbath School Visiter by an eye

so hummingbird ~ one foot bare

in cardinal blooms, how we tread

sometimes soles naked up to

Mount Norwotock’s trillium,

white estuaries that bright

her ankle complimented +

Abiah rooted this day our earth,

what remnants of nightgown, we

cottoned flesh-borne, the root of our

senses, scored thinner heavenwards,

abided no thunder-flood, skied up

East, moth speaker, who were you

that moon in bedclothes, and at dawn

slept under heathers? forget your

herbarium and come with, whatever

transgress we made to wildflower

roams, there a kiss to light, crescent

at dusk ~ relieves all ~

+ kenned + espied

+communicant

The Incidentals, Book One, Fragment

. . . the barriers

erected in the Transcendental Analytic either

showed me up for a fraud, and causality really

bounded my experience or else I waywardly fell

into disgust of words like ‘experience’ and 'cause' -

later, that damned Dasein sought nobly to

dissolve some barrier between subject and object,

but what was his objective anyhow? to

disabuse us of a pure Cartesian charade, with

the supposed interior of some somnambulant?

but objects supposed some idea of reception,

contact, whether ideal or physical, I guess 

the same assumption grounded our

tendency to just sit down among peers

and drink juice from black seeds, and yet

this notion of the everyday, the casual,

will show us up as quacks, even more

pretentious than the philosophes of the

salons who quite frankly gave us our

careers - every criterion made someone a

pompous jerk, at the end of their thesis.

Felipe Gaston Muñoz would like to note further orthographic eccentricities on this website: “er” for “or” in the age of good old E.D. Originally from Arizona, he spends his time freaking out over idiosyncratic typography and impossibly arcane, 16th century punctuation. He is currently working on two long poems, The Drop Keels and The Incidentals. One of his poems is forthcoming in Barrow Street Journal. Lastly, he apologizes to any of our Massachusetts readers for the orthographically obsolete “Norwotock” for modern-day “Norwottuck.”