The Best American Poetry

William Waltz presents. . .a poem by Mary Ruefle

As much as I try to stay in the moment, it seems all my attention, as an editor, goes to the forthcoming issue as soon as the current issue is shipped across the country and over the seas. So, writing these posts has given me the excuse to read through our catalogue, which, despite commonsense and the laws of economics, is now twenty issues deep. It’s been a thrill to re-discover poems, not that I had forgotten them, not at all, but, like re-connecting with old friends, I had forgotten how satisfying it was to be in their company.

We tend to think of forgetting as a malfunction of some sort, yet much of what we forget is evidence of a functioning memory. The world would be too much if our brains didn’t slough off the vast majority of it. But I can’t help thinking that how we remember by forgetting resembles how we write poetry. Memory selects but a handful of sensations and their corresponding people, actions, things, etc., to archive in the brain’s wet network. Those selected inevitably accrue added significance, which is to say they become concentrated. The poet makes similar selections and cuts with hopes of yielding similar results.

Maybe another way of saying it is that the successful poet possesses the facility for intense focus on the page, extracting from her experience, imagination, or both, a rich distillate to share with her readers. This power of focus is one of the things that I love and admire about Mary Ruefle’s poem “Cardamom Buds,” which first appeared in “Past Imperfect: The Trouble with Remembering and Forgetting,” Conduit #11. Mary’s voice, strong and firm, strides, despite her speaker’s somewhat agitated and fragile emotional state, through this poem, from 30,000 feet to the kitchen counter. The world is there and the world falls away leaving speaker and reader there, alone.

I almost forgot to write that this is my last dispatch for The Best American Poetry blog. Thanks for reading.

-- William Waltz

Cardamom Buds

High in the sky someone ate a peanut and accepted
a complimentary beverage, Mr. Rabbit’s corduroy robe
was taken off and put on nine times in the next seat,
a spatula was made in a factory far below
and one who had lost the habit of marveling took it home
and turned things over. Undoubtedly I still loved you
and man remained an inexpressible island of grief.
It began to rain, and I don’t know if I was alone or
by myself (was I washing my hands or the bar of soap?)
but the growing season was over. The rain came nonetheless
and I saw with intense thankfulness a few cardamom buds
lying on the counter. Nothing else mattered!
I was no longer a zebra lost among birches,
and the great beauty of my upward striving
was received with intense thankfulness
by no one in particular. Tea was in order.
I sat at the counter and let life sketch me.
I blushed at first, believing I took up too much space.
I crossed and uncrossed my legs. I folded and unfolded\
my hands. I couldn’t move much more than that,
for on the other side of the room your ghost stood,
waving a palette. Come over here! it cried,
I’ll make you as small as you like!
But I stayed where I was, and dropped the cardamom buds
in my tea, certain the summons couldn’t possibly apply to me.

-- Mary Ruefle

William Waltz presents. . .a Poem by Dara Wier

On October 12, three inches of snow draped the broad shoulders of our white pine like a moth-eaten shawl. Three inches of snow covered the lush green lawns of summer across the Twin Cities. Three inches of snow were the most to have collected here this early since 1977. For much of the citizenry, this was a near disaster, a cruel reminder of things to come. In short, it was downright terrible, but terrible is such a lovely word.

I suppose there really isn’t a bad word, a word without qualities, so in a sense all words are wonderful. But as Mr. Orwell might have said, some words are more equal than others. We all have our favorites and those that go unloved based on our unique palette of beliefs, hang-ups, interests, and eccentricities. A friend of mine loathes the word slacks and will break out in a sweat at the mere utterance of ointment. The more equal words work as poetry works, first suggesting one thing and then another. They resemble a rope ladder hung from the top branch of a tall oak tree.

Thanks to Dara Wier, we have “The Terrible Poem,” which can be found in Conduit #20. Since 1977, when her first book came out, Ms. Wier has written eleven books of poetry including her new and highly anticipated Selected Poems. To the delight of all who’ve kept up with her prodigious output, Wier’s poems keep getting better and better. From line to line, they surprise and startle, they yearn and crack wise, they disarm and console. Often kaleidoscopic in nature, Wier’s poems are fearless—not reckless—not to be different but to be true.

Several years ago, I had the pleasure of accompanying Dara and James Tate to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Afterward we wandered over the Ashbery bridge, which spans the interstate separating the garden from a city park. On the park side we found a couple cooking salmon over a campfire.  A sight I had never seen before or since. It was one of those charmed moments when the unexpected blesses you with its occurrence, and by doing so it enlivens you, much like a Wier poem.

-- William Waltz

The Terrible Poem

Love lives just sit there on the sidelines.
I’ve never told a soul what it is I believe.
Things never will never stop getting stop more stop long stop, ago.
Everything material in theory is able to cast a shadow.
Everything’s shadow is a different shade of black with violent overtones.
If someone says a sheep is nothing but a big box of mittens
I don’t think it will enable me to sleep better tomorrow.
The girl placed a cocoon in a glass jar too small for what emerged.
I placed a hermit crab near by, next to, a fire.
We look for something beautiful and do unmendable damage.
I have a clear memory of something I’m sure hasn’t happened.
It’ll take a while to drag the freaks away from their cribs.
Hey baby, say a while will you while will you while will you.
That is our lullaby, that is our unnamable anthem, you are catgut.

-- Dara Wier

 

William Waltz presents. . .a poem by Terri Ford

At the risk of offending our other issues, I’ll admit that Conduit #6 is one of my favorites. Not only was it our first perfect-bound edition, but “Drunk Genius” featured poems by Russell Edson, an interview with Terence McKenna, and our first and only prize winning poem, “Mister Hymen” by Terri Ford.

It was our first and only because of the generosity and then the untimely death of Saul Astor. As much as we wanted to continue the prize on an annual basis, we couldn’t without his kind help, so Terri Ford stands alone atop our Mount Olympus. “Mister Hymen,” which can be found in Ford’s book Hams beneath the Firmament, charmed and amazed us, and, although the competition was stiff, our choice was easy.

The case of the triumphant Miss Ford illustrates the it’s-a-small-world phenomenon, which is one of the windfalls of being an editor. We’re all familiar with this minor miracle of chance, where one meets another and both know a third and through one another other lovely people are introduced. And so by some strange coincidence Terri Ford knew the nephew of Scott Bruno, our art director at that time.

A year later while visiting Scott in Cincinnati, we arranged to meet Terri, our champion, for dinner. She brought along the nephew and another friend, whose contact information I would later forward to his future publisher. We had a wonderful conversation over mulligatawny and lamb vindaloo and thus began a friendship.

The next day we had the pleasure of seeing Terri read her poems to a high school class. This included the breathtaking image of Miss Ford throwing over-sized granny panties into a crowd of shrieking teenage boys. And so it goes; without Saul Astor and “Mister Hymen” none of this would have come to pass.

-- William Waltz

Mister Hymen

Relent, says he with his cigarillos, his
splintered windshield.  You fain think
he’s neat, is boss, is mustang,

yup.  When he covers your north
with kisses,       oho the hymen
hies, bucolic      inland you’re tossing

edelweiss, unmown and springing.  This thump
and wag hath no repose            & when, how soon, he’s

dying (says)      —So you, as
foreordained, give         in.  What he broke’s
not glass, but a low grief, volcanic
and inactive years.  See him run.  All

of the villagers run
from heat, and you spread,
spread.

-- Terri Ford

William Waltz presents. . .a poem by Greg Bachar

During the glorious summer of 1993, my dear accomplice Brett Astor and I were awhirl in the air-conditioned confines of a Massachusetts copy center, cutting, pasting, and assembling the premier issue of Conduit. At the risk of sounding like an old geezer, I must report that those were the days when the copy center was the creative epicenter of many college towns.

Fueled by dreams and caffeine, we arranged the work of ten promising poets between our blue cardstock cover. The production values left something to be desired certainly — I was broke and impatient — but to this day I stand behind the poems in that inaugural issue. Of those ten poets, five have been lucky enough to have had books published and then well reviewed. I think the others deserve the same -- including today’s poet, Greg Bachar.

I’ve known Greg for nearly twenty years, yet I’ll never forget the first time I visited his rathskeller of an apartment in Amherst. On three or four desks and tables and covering a good portion of the floor lay what seemed to be innumerable writing, reading, and publishing projects in various stages of completion. Ambitious, prolific, tenderhearted, original, Greg is a poet in the truest sense.

Maybe it was the years spent in Europe as a boy or his voracious appetite for the Surrealists, their contemporaries, and their literary antecedents, but much of Bachar’s work has a continental feel to it. Daniil Kharms comes to mind, for there is a beautifully bureaucratic sense of humor at work, which is tempered by love’s twin demons, loneliness and melancholy. “Finally Myself” first appeared in our “Last Laugh” issue (#19).

-- William Waltz

Finally Myself

No one knows that I am nobody. They think that I am somebody, and treat me as such, with equal parts fear and apprehension. To be somebody doing nothing is one thing, but I am nobody doing something, and that confuses them. They think it odd that a somebody like me would do what I do. None of them listen when I try to tell them I am no one and that although I am doing something, they might as well think of me as doing nothing, since it would be easier to be seen as a nobody that way.

I want to marry a real nobody, someone who means nothing to no one anywhere. That would be something to me, and she would be my everything. My nobody girl, how everybody will love her, thinking her a real somebody like me, but it’s nothing, really, just a little of this and a little of that, some crumbs and a piece of ice tied to black string.

That, to me, is something. Being a nobody, nothing suits me quite well.

-- Greg Bachar

William Waltz presents. . .a Poem by Dean Young

My friend and colleague the recently departed John Parker once told me a student of his believed that poems were written in code, which, once broken, would reveal the poem’s true meaning. This young man also believed there was a Rosetta stone of a book hidden somewhere in the library that decoded most of the canonical works. I would have enjoyed hearing John’s reply to such assertions.

This week’s poem is by the magnificent Dean Young. Mr. Young’s poems have appeared numerous times in the pages of Conduit, for which we are honored, thankful and, at times, downright giddy. “Original Monkey” first appeared in our “Neighborhood Gods” (#12) issue and later in his book Elegy on Toy Piano.

Dean uses a typewriter and white-out. His poems come with smudges. I like this. I can’t help wondering how his poems might be different if he used a word processor as 90% of the poets who submit do (or how the poems of the other 90% might be different if they didn’t). I like how Dean keeps sending us poems, how he feels at home between our covers. And, of course I love that he selected Zoo Music as the winner of the Slope Editions Book Prize, not just because he made me a winner but because he was a judge with whom I truly felt an affinity. I was glad to tell him just that when we finally met.

People often point out the humor in Dean Young’s poems, yet anyone who has ever laughed at him knows that behind every chuckle there is either agony or anger. Dean’s poems are long-legged animals running through the tall grass, following his instincts. His path is neither frantic nor methodical, but he always catches his prey. Sometimes it’s a monkey. Meaning, meaning in good poems can’t be seen straight on. One must look askance.

Original Monkey

I'm working on my vanishing point.
I'm practicing my zenith.
I used to rely on a piece of glass
to plunge into my heart but that's nothing
compared to my monkey. Usually
we meet on a bench by the whortleberries
to weep and watch the lambs disappear
into the chasm. Hey, it's a rotten world
for a monkey too. Just because
you've got opposable thumbs
doesn't mean you can untrip the trap.
My monkey though is very self-involved
so when the glass doesn't work
and the invisible girders are groaning
and I can't get back to the old country
of the great works of Western art
restored to the luminosity of Looney Tunes,
I call my friend who's drunk again\
like me like me and my moonbeam.
Wrong answer. Wrong ballistics report.
Wrong club membership. Wrong draconian
countermeasure. Wrong emergency room
where the client in the party hat
blinking blood says, It's nothing,
it's nothing. I'll be the judge of that.
We can see that once the work of interpretation
is done, the dream is the fulfillment of a wish
just as the injury is the fulfillment of a wish
and vibrating at the speed of E flat
and unloading heads into the furnace
and realism which is a form of surrealism
on a time-delayed fuse so what I'd like to know
is who's making all these helpful wishes?
My agony is no sillier than yours
even if it's riding a tiny unicycle.
All I'm asking for is a fellow monkey
to accompany my original monkey
in his bridal sadness. Once he was one
among many in tree. Once my piece of glass
was part of a larger piece of glass
which was part of a larger piece glass
which was…okay, you get the point.
As if back there somewhere
was something immense and intact.

-- Dean Young

William Waltz presents. . .a prose poem by Sarah Manguso

Although I’ve been urged, now and then, to go there, I’ve never been to Hell. A good Minnesotan might say, “I hear it’s nice there in the winter.” They say war is Hell, and I’m pretty sure they’re right about that, so that means there’s a little Hell here on Earth. Two arid locales come to mind, and, in case we forget while the “battle” over heath insurance rages, dozens of other wars churn around the globe today.

Of course, Hell is a state of mind, really, not a place, and it befalls us all from time to time. And, as is the way with most things, Hell comes in degrees. There’s the burning, piercing Hell of torture and war, and then there’s the low-grade fever variety that catches us between what we have and what we want, leaving us feeling either stuck or adrift.

Thankfully, this is in the province of poetry, and this week’s poem, “Hell,” by Sarah Manguso, marches in triumphantly. “Hell” first appeared in our “Dumb Luck” issue (#14). It was then selected for Best American Poetry’s 2005 edition, edited by Paul Muldoon, before appearing in Ms. Manguso’s Siste Viator.

In this lovely prose poem, full of humanity and humor, Manguso uses short declarative sentences and longer winding ones that arrive just where they should to the reader’s great pleasure. Somehow she manages to say things, wise things, you wish you had. She does this often, yet the poem doesn’t prescribe a remedy, it is a remedy.

-- William Waltz

Hell

The second-hardest thing I have to do is not be longing’s slave.

Hell is that. Hell is that, others, having a job, and not having a job. Hell is thinking continually of those who were truly great.

Hell is the moment you realize that you were ignorant of the fact, when it was true, that you were not yet ruined by desire.

The kind of music I want to continue hearing after I am dead is the kind that makes me think I will be capable of hearing it then.

There is music in Hell. Wind of desolation! It blows past the egg-eyed statues. The canopic jars are full of secrets.

The wind blows through me. I open my mouth to speak.

I recite the list of people I have copulated with. It does not take long. I say the names of my imaginary children. I call out four-syllable words beginning with B. This is how I stay alive.

Beelzebub. Brachiosaur. Bubble-headed. I don’t know how I stay alive. What I do know is that there is a light, far above us, that goes out when we die,

and that in Hell there is a gray tulip that grows without any sun. It reminds me of everything I failed at,

and I water it carefully. It is all I have to remind me of you.

--Sarah Manguso

William Waltz presents. . .a poem by Bob Hicok

My family and I made our annual trek to the Minnesota State Fair last week. As is our custom, we paid tribute to the grand sow and her litter, to king kohlrabi and his edible stem and all the other blue-ribbon vegetables, and to Princess Kay of Milky Way and her court. (Kay is Minnesota's state dairy princess.) Well, not Princess Kay and her court per se but to their likenesses sculpted in butter and refrigerated in the dairy barn. As we waded down Dan Patch Avenue, through its sweaty throngs, a voice on the public address system floated over our heads announcing that something important was about to happen in the swine barn.

Not only did this serve to remind me of the time I paid the PA booth at the county fair five cents to make the following announcement, “Jim Jarrells, you girlfriend is waiting for you in the pig barn,” but it made me realize that this blog is a public address system of sorts, and so, with your kind permission, I would like to make a public plea, Would whomever I last loaned Bob Hicok’s Plus Shipping please return it! No questions asked. I make this petition because I love that book and it’s out-of-print and the Internet prices are steep. This tells me I should keep better track of my books and that Hicok’s poetry is in great demand, as it should be.

The same qualities that make Bob Hicok a great poet also make many of his poems small living planets revolving around their own glorious sun. Bob’s poems demonstrate a keen intelligence, a restless yearning for meaning, heart, humor, and generosity. Years ago, immediately after reading Plus Shipping, I wrote Mr. Hicok. A few weeks later I received a telephone message thanking me and saying that he had just mailed poems to Conduit. That was my first and last message of its kind from any poet. I’m very pleased to report that since then we’ve published Bob Hicok no fewer than six times, starting with the “Big Bang” issue (#7). This week’s poem, “Wistful sounds like a brand of air freshener,” first appeared in “Holy Hootenanny” (#17).

-- William Waltz

Wistful sounds like a brand of air freshener

I will go to Belfast, Maine, and read my poetry to crabs.
I’ll stand on a platform of some kind in the company of wind
and look at pennants waving and think of the claws
of crabs waving in the wind of the Atlantic and be sad.
It’s not that I don’t have enough sadness, but I’m always looking
for better, more aquatic or tastier sadness, for the kind
of light that comes when the sky tilts its head at dusk
and wonders, in colors we understand as language, why this all
has to end. I could doff a Bogart hat and wag a tough cigarette
between my lips, smoke muscling up from my mouth as I say, it just does,
sweetheart, it just does, but the psychology of the fedora
escapes me. There’s bread and calisthenics and lice and radar
and jars of blue stuff in stores, and maybe what I’m doing
when I cry to certain songs at seventy miles an hour, is proving
I’ve noticed that out of the nothing that could be here,
everything is. So I will go to Belfast, Maine, and wonder
what it’s like to stand beside Main Street in the winter,
I’ll put my head against the brick buildings I’m betting
live there year-round and describe the tropics to them
by having warm thoughts, and if you’d like to meet me there,
I’ll be the man in the t-shirt that has an extra sleeve
in case the third arm I need shows up, because so far,
I’ve dropped almost everything I’m desperate to hold.

-- Bob Hicok

William Waltz presents. . .a sestina by Noelle Kocot

Like a leaky zeppelin, National Night Out descends upon our cities the first Tuesday of every August. Some neighborhoods ignore it. Others, unfortunately, embrace it. This often leads to street blockades and forced mingling in the name of community and fun. The sad truth is the same hollow feeling that follows one home after an awkward wedding will very likely escort one through the streets after such a gathering. For poets the great pothole of awkwardness is met when an unfamiliar neighbor asks, “What sort of poetry do you write?” For the record, “human poetry” is my answer.

As an editor, I often field a similar query, “What kind of poems do you publish?” Protocol suggests the professional editor should be thoughtful, forthright, and “creative,” given the possibility of a sale at hand. But in all honesty, we simply publish poems we like. An astute reader might be able to identify a Conduit type, but I believe that same person would testify that we cast a wide net. Nevertheless, I can think of four, five, or maybe six poets who, as a group, might best represent the Conduit poetic sensibility. Since their membership in this unholy cabal is unbeknownst to them, I’ll keep their identities secret. Well, except for one, the author of this week’s poem, “Brooklyn Sestina: June, 1975,” Noelle Kocot.

Although we first published Ms. Kocot in “Drunk Genius” (#6) and then again in “Pedestrian” (#7), “Big Bang” (#9), “Extinction” (#13), “Gray Matters” (#15), and “Last Laugh” (#19), I had never had the pleasure of meeting her until last November in New York. That’s not to say we aren’t friends. We have forged a friendship over the telephone and through letters. But it’s her poems that get her published. She’s an incredible poet, a true poet, prolific and profound, vulnerable and victorious in her pursuit of love and wonder.

"Brooklyn Sestina: June, 1975” first appeared in our “Pedestrian” issue and was later included in her award-winning book 4 (Four Way Books). As this poem demonstrates, the sestina is well suited to follow the poet’s searching mind and to contain, just barely but perfectly, the unwieldy stuff of life.

-- William Waltz

Brooklyn Sestina: June, 1975

How can I conjure the vivdness of the plastic
Blue and orange chairs we'd slump
Into every morning before the tyranny of fractions,
Each afternoon after the sadism of lunch?
We'd just played "Boys against Girls,"
"Girls against Boys," slamming each other's small bodies

Into a schoolyard fence, as if to add to the body
Of what American feminism had become, its piles of plastic
Dolls dismembered like Bluebeard's wives, only this time by girls
Of single mothers slumped
Into plaid couches, too tired or too drunk to fix those cleanly cut-out lunches
Like the ones beamed into their living rooms through the Cyclopean fractal

Blue-rimmed eye of the cathode ray refracted
By those radio ballads that sent everybody
Who'd ever broken up to sobbing in their McDonald's Muzak lunches.
Why is it that everything smelled like plastic
As the yellow heatwave slumped
Against my salmon-colored building where the girls

Were jumping rope (the older girls
Skipping double Dutch)? Could it have been the fractious
Yentas looking on from sweaty beach chairs clumped
Together in the shade, their widowed bodies
Already melted and annealed to a tanned and cracking plastic?
The housewives who went on serving each other lunch

Like it would never end? I would soon be off to lunch
Myself at Jewish camp with a girl
My age named Rachel, offering her what I'd plastic-
Wrapped the night before, her six-year-old fractions
Of hands fumbling over my body
In return before our midday swim. No Cold War, no economic slump

Could touch us in that Brooklyn; Brooklyn, the word itself seems holy, a Cabalistic lunchbox
Yawning open for all the world to fathom its great plastic
Letters stretched bodiless
Across the level see-saw of the summer heat like the broken balloon of a girl's
Insides, her future a fractal-
Patterned leaf dangling from her family tree of dusty plastic.

And the shoulders on the bodies of the girls
Who hadn't been pinned to their beds at night slumped in the lunchroom
Nonetheless, its fractured spoons and forks still scattering across the dance floor of my
                  dreams, a threnody of plastic.

-- Noelle Kocot

"Conduit" Corner: William Waltz Presents a Poem by Sabrina Orah Mark

Assembling an issue of Conduit sometimes feels like building a giant electron telescope and pointing it toward deep space. We never know what our mad invention will reveal until we peer through the viewfinder. We do know that the efforts and imaginations of many are required to bring our collective dream into focus every six months. In the case of the current issue, “Humans ‘N Nature,” over forty people helped to calibrate its searching eye.

For the majority, it was their first time in Conduit, but for a dozen contributors it was their second or third or fourth time between our covers. Last week I mentioned the joy of finding a wildflower among the weeds. Another great pleasure is to champion, over time, a writer whose work we admire and whom is, presumably, fond of us.

One such poet is Sabrina Orah Mark. Three of our issues have featured her prose poems, including “The 10 Stages of Beatrice,” which can be found below and in her forthcoming book Tsim Tsum (Saturnalia Books). To our enormous satisfaction, “The 10 Stages of Beatrice” was selected by Heather McHugh for the Best American Poetry 2007.

Ms. Mark’s recurring characters, Beatrice and Walter B., inhabit a world fecund with Old World charm and inanimate objects of mysterious significance, and, in the process of rendering this world, Sabrina Orah Mark has created a timeless fable full of longing, humor, and tendernes

-- William Waltz

THE 10 STAGES OF BEATRICE

Stage 1. — Belonging.

In the first stage Beatrice is precisely labeled and timed. She is able to divise complex graphs, answer questions in the order that they're asked, and construct coherent narratives without nostalgia or actual fear. There is no display of loud sobbing, nor are there visions.

Stage 2.— Happy.

Beatrice, during the second stage, believes she is alive. The possibility that she is not alive, in this stage, never enters her mind. This stage is only possible if the spectacle comes to town.

Stage 3. — Walter B.

This stage is also called "the latch stage." It is Beatrice at her most historical and strange.

Stage 4. — Romance.

Beatrice is hunted, captured, and softly strung to a tree. In this stage words are used to intoxicate, supply, and deceive. These words are rarely interesting. Gifts are exchanged that are of no use.

Stage 5. — Dread.

Beatrice is covered in feathers and twigs. She believes she is a nest. This stage, if it occurs in winter, is also called "The Babies."

Stage 6. — Slice. 

The sixth stage often appears in Beatrice's hand like a long instrument with a blade at the end. She will eat cake, during this stage, until she has visions.

Stage 7. — Cryptozoology.

In the seventh stage Beatrice wears a green dress with large white pockets in which to store the evidence. If this stage is mingled with the second stage, ecstasy is achieved.

Stage 8. — Crowded.

Beatrice is behind glass. In this stage Beatrice is blurred by the humans who observe her without caution. 

Stage 9. — Poland.

Beatrice gathers her grandfather into her arms. She recites him from his memory. The ninth stage sounds like this: tsim tsum, tsim tsum, tsim tsum.

Stage 10. — Return.

In the final stage Beatrice watches Beatrice feed the babies with a spade.

-- Sabrina Orah Mark

William Waltz presents a poem by Carley Moore (from "Conduit" #20)

 It’s true Conduit may have too many slogans for a budget-deficit endeavor, but we insist. One of my personal favorites states that it’s published “when least expected.” This refers to our irregular schedule. Conduit is a biannual that has been publishing since 1993, yet only recently did we publish our twentieth issue. No, the math doesn’t quite add up, but nevertheless we persist.

The idea for Conduit came to me, just before I graduated from the University of Massachusetts, when I realized that few of my many talented associates were getting published. Because there were fewer venues to publish then and even fewer willing to take chances on unknown voices, or so I thought, I determined the remedy for such a malady was to start a magazine, to start “the only magazine that risks annihilation,” and thus Conduit was born. From the beginning, we’ve championed the young, the unknown, and the unaffiliated. It’s a joy to publish one’s heroes as we have, but it’s almost sweeter to find a wildflower among the weeds.

Carley Moore’s “The Match” is the first poem in our twentieth issue, “Humans ‘N Nature.” I can’t say I know much about Ms. Moore aside from she writes a no nonsense cover letter and polite emails, but we took a fancy to her poem right away. And when the time came I knew “The Match” had to lead the issue off. Plainspoken as it appears, the poem welcomes, calms, disarms, and even comforts before dispatching the reader to that beautiful, yet slippery, precipice where reason and unreason hang in the balance.

-- William Waltz

The Match

At the stairs to the top of the volcano,
you warn me, “Secrets are small fires.
Let’s be more primitive. Let’s tie ourselves up.
Let’s wait for the monster.”
We do. We tie. We wait. And we wait.
This waiting is more like a highway than a staircase.
This waiting is more like waiting than I thought it would be.

There are things that are right about the moon,
but it’s not enough. You want to live underneath the volcano—
to stop hanging out in other people’s hallways.
You want to take the kitchen chairs out of the kitchen.
It’s not unreasonable, but then you cut your heel on the crust of the volcano.

You beg to be put to bed and I do it.
I pretend to know what you are.
You are something that lies down and offers itself.
You are small and almost wooden—a match trying to move to the fire.
You are my arm reaching to turn out the light.

-- Carley Moore