Dispatches From the Basement

The Work Summer is a ritual of endurance. The way rain rewinds into haze no color cuts through. Even the tiger lilies surrounding the supermarket parking lot are washed out, mute. Today’s forecast: suffocation. You have to strain to catch the signal that ignites the voice flowering beyond the brain — a language you hardly know as your own, but it is yours. You stand outside the poem, tend to its edges. Worry the seams. Keep it from collapsing. This is the work you’ve been given.

Dispatch #162 josephmassey.substack.com

Clear After eight days of rain what isn’t overwritten under sun. These asphalt cracks pushed further apart. Eight days without definition: gray walled the room in, and I thought I found a way to stop thinking—to allow gray to become a sound I couldn’t hum myself out of. All I heard was a window. A long weed beat unevenly against it.

Dispatch #161 josephmassey.substack.com

Summer Sequence Between power lines storm clouds buckle and drift. Great blue heron, rare omen, banks into a plume of rain fogging the horizon. Dizzy for a phrase to make the day cohere, I sit in shade and take dictation from a field. Anything for relief from time and how time discombobulates in the pounding sun. For relief, the green streak of a dragonfly suspended in haze. And cold rain— my mouth open at the brink of meaning.

Dispatch #160 josephmassey.substack.com

Northern Tracks Ferns flash dark, chafe train windows relieved by graffiti: faded white runes scrawled on an underpass slant. Barbed-wire fence wrapped around cracked concrete, crabgrass, green plastic bags ballooning light. A sign reads SPECIAL METALS as we coast into a ghost town— half a ghost, at least, lingering. Every window in every building broken—one with a branch lanced into it. Tree and house fused, as if attached to the same decaying root system.

Dispatch #159 josephmassey.substack.com

After Wittgenstein A contrail divides the skyline wrinkled with heat. Flies circle trash— clear plastic—at the seam between brick path and lawn. Hours atrophy. There is the inexpressible but it doesn’t show itself today. It doesn’t show itself in summer. Even shade as it erases radiates.

This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts