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# 3 Poems by Joseph Massey
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/3-poems-by-joseph-massey/
- Published: 2015-01-29T17:03:53.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:43:37.000Z
- Description: Our poetry editor, Joe Pan, has selected three poems by Joseph Massey for his series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
- Author: Joe Pan
- Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:08 (2014, 2015, part 2)

*Our poetry editor, Joe Pan, has selected three poems by Joseph Massey for* [*his series*](http://hyperallergic.com/tag/hyperallergic-poetry/) *that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.*

![Ryan Seslow and Leon Reid IV's "Technophemera" (2014) installation at LIU's Steinberg Museum of Art (photo Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/01/img_2580-1280.jpg)

Ryan Seslow and Leon Reid IV’s “Technophemera” (2014) installation at LIU’s Steinberg Museum of Art (photo Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)

\* \* \*

## What Follows

To arrive at a kind of quiet  
that won’t recoil into speech

or uncoil into music, illegible  
as dusk and its marginalia.

Mind is place  
and world, pieces—

how one runs into another, another.  
Remember the dark as it creases the dark

could be any animal.

## Measures

Is this the season  
to sleep off disease

bunker under  
a low frequency

write into the distance  
between shadows  
on a leaf-calloused lawn

What can’t be decoded

swerves within  
window vision

locked in glossolalia

where a letter  
separates word from world

preserved  
in perseveration

One last blue jay bats  
fruit red as a warning

## South Station

Retaining wall graffiti twists  
into a word: a kind of sound,  
closed vowel, filtered through

a bus window. Massachusetts—  
this chewed-through surface  
of brick and leftover color.

…

Image is always afterimage.

Smashed factory windows  
flash black in overgrowth

and mask my vision.

That, too, is a kind of sound.

…

Cold collapses  
anything I’d think  
or think to say.  
November’s wiry  
reticulation, the  
dull glint between  
locust branches.

Sparrow in  
a planter, in  
a fugue state,  
kicking up mulch  
by the metal bench  
where we sit.

The weightlessness  
of your face on my arm.

\* \* \*

Joseph Massey is the author of [*Areas of Fog*](http://www.shearsman.com/ws-shop/product/4158-joseph-massey-areas-of-fog?ref=hyperallergic.com) (Shearsman Books, 2009), [*At the Point*](http://www.shearsman.com/ws-shop/category/959-massey-joseph/product/4159-joseph-massey-at-the-point?ref=hyperallergic.com) (Shearsman Books, 2011), [*To Keep Time*](http://www.omnidawn.com/products-page/current/to-keep-timejoseph-massey/?ref=hyperallergic.com) (Omnidawn, 2014), and [*Illocality*](http://www.wavepoetry.com/search?q=Illocality&ref=hyperallergic.com) (Wave Books, forthcoming in 2015). He lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.