Our poetry editor, Joe Pan, has selected three poems by Dan Magers for his series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
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(image by Dan Magers)
SPIRITUAL GRAVE YEAR
To have for yourself such boundless love
that you give up writing forever.
The future is in the stars. Pain spelled like the color.
Jesus stands before me—
and out of his midsection comes an arm
with a gun in its hand, and he says,
“Do me a favor, kill yourself.”
Blank white submission pouring blood all over
my attractive friends.
Without you, the cute world died on a spike.
And if I name my daughter after you,
she will spontaneously combust
on her sixth birthday, pink detritus like confetti,
victim at the altar of my dark fantasies.
BUMMER CULTURE
*Somewhere* feels so deep to me. The contemplative hills,
1984 Karate Kid the station wagon drives across.
And Brad Nowell being dead, and seventeen years ago feeling
his death was like a new friend. And seventeen years later,
he is the same as when he first died.
Fucking at the same wound
at the tip of all her thoughts,
time quietly extinguishing life,
or life burning through time.
The lightness of the abyss as blood spills into heaven.
Panic is a monopoly of feeling. The happy day you found him.
At last life is providing my dreams with a feverish weight.
Visited upon by a plague of hotties.
And I save up my life of melancholy and embrace the demon.
SPIRITUAL GRAVE YEAR
If your therapist could also hear your thoughts—
would that scare you?
Or would you like it?
As a talented writer on mushrooms,
I feel like I can convey the beauty of the multiplicity of the world.
I feel like I have reached that ability.
My girlfriend complained about my sweaty body
until I lost my erection.
Then we broke up.
Now when I get drunk, I wag my finger at whom I’m talking to,
like I don’t want no scrubs.
Moving backwards in time towards your birth.
At some point you will hit an end point.
Then an ether point. A negative space.
Field recordings of the dead. To give remorse on all fours.
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Dan Magers’s first book of poems, Partyknife, (Birds, LLC, 2012) was described by Thurston Moore “as if poet-ghost adrift thru dressing rooms backstage taking notes …Writing poems like these is just as good as starting a band.” Magers is a collaborator with the artist Matt Bollinger, most recently on his solo show Bed on the Floor at Zürcher Studio, New York in 2013. Magers is the founder of the online poetry journal Sink Review and the handmade chapbook press Immaculate Disciples Press, which focuses on poetry book and artist collaborations. He lives in Brooklyn.
