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Translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim Swapping seven balls with his palm, and with air. Precision inhabits the gap between the ball’s trajectory and its anticipated pace at the brink of hesitation— the arc of descent. How does one grasp making sense of timing when to hurl and when to catch? Is it when one rehearses alone or when one rehearses being alone? Which one holds when there is no break from motion, and from emotion? They thought, he makes gravity.
The Death Metal Pastorals turns over the rolling green hills of the idyllic American landscape, excavates their violences, and attenuates the powers that live atop them. In Ryan Patrick Smith’s pastoral, “nothing works here but blood & radio,” and from page one, we know we’re entering a landscape at once more ominous and more vigilant than anything conjured by Spencer, Drayton, or Marlowe.
The moment we say alone we are not. The sun tucks under the mouth of a mountain yet still light fills our skin. Every day a heart is pulled out like a wet plum from one body and placed inside another. Every day someone comes home to a lover packing her bags. It is normal to fall asleep in pain and wake with more. We break open clouds by waiting long enough. Behind this midnight other midnights trace a face so familiar we touch our cheekbones like twin moons.
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