Prose Poems Editor’s Note: Sometimes, in the world of small publishing, schedules fall behind. As you all may well have noticed, we didn’t have a January Prose Poems issue. And this, our combined January-February Prose Poems issue, is about as late as February allows. But there’s a good reason for this delay: We’ve started a poetry press: Knockout Books, and we’re announcing our first release, Democracy of Noise, by Dan Pinkerton. It’s available for pre-order now here and will be available in April, just in time for National Poetry Month.
Democracy of Noise is a hilarious, surreal send-up of soulless, late-Empire America, a land of unparalleled power, cartoonish wealth amid deep pain and poverty, scientific prowess never-before-seen, but also a place sick at heart with an endless streak of greed, authoritarianism and violence ready to erupt, and more than anything, a nonstop yearning, everywhere, for unmet meaning. In Democracy of Noise, Dan Pinkerton has written the perfect summary of our surreal, depressing-to-the-point-of-hilarity times. These poems are a Venn diagram of all of us. And don’t be fooled: this isn’t some idle art; if you pay attention, you might just recognize what’s wrong in our shared life, or your own. In a country where book bannings have become a point of pride, it’s rare for any book, especially a poetry title, to be important. But this one, without question is.
Knockout Books is a Minnesota-based imprint of Gray Duck Press, and it is named for the superior Minnesotan variant of the famous children’s game. Prose Poems editor Brett Ortler runs both outfits. Gray Duck Press also publishes some damn good romance novels as well!
In this issue, we’re featuring a set of four prose poems by Dan Pinkerton, as well as wonderful poems by Corey Bryant and Lyanne Wang. So please forgive us for the delay!
The Pit
The town fathers, seeking a novel concept, hit on building a pit, one so grand in its proportions that sightseers might come from afar to gawk. A pride thing, of course, though for taxpayers the pit would also serve a certain utility. Cored to great depths, lead-lined and laddered, the pit became orphanage for unwanted stuff: used motor oil, road-killed carcasses, defoliated Christmas trees, unexploded ordnance. Of course, we welcomed the collateral beauty of dropping things in and hearing them splat. High school kids made many a Friday night of such sport. Then the issue arose of living animals—strays, runts, malformed farm creatures—heaved, then cars eased in as a joke, then the problem kid at school and an unfaithful wife, unwary victims afterward marked as missing, photos push-pinned to corkboards all over town. The pit by this point had turned toxic: not even the hazmat guys, making time-and-a-half, dared descend. Maybe the pit wasn’t such a great idea, the town fathers conceded. So they chose, after debate, to fill it with water. A water-filled pit, after all, is a horse of a different color. Developers might build a subdivision around such a thing, calling it “Lakefront Vista.” The intrepid might even try and water ski.
DAN PINKERTON
Foyer
I find the sickly subhuman creature writhing in the foyer. “What an admirable foyer,” he groans. I look around. Yes, I guess it is something to be admired, how it reaches skyward in an indelicate, almost unwholesome manner. “I’ll never have a foyer like this,” he whines. I might think to ask why not, but the more timely, pertinent, perhaps even arresting question is how the creature made his way into my home in the first place, past the deadbolts and alarms. He sets off a theatric new series of groans as I head to the basement for the great steely trap I purchased at the home improvement warehouse. For the extermination of vermin large and small, its label reads. I drag the monstrosity upstairs, bait it with pork hocks, and set the vicious maw, then retreat to the kitchen to start dinner. In the midst of our cutlets, my family and I hear the trap spring shut with a gratifying snap. That, I suppose, is why the creature will never have a foyer like mine.
DAN PINKERTON
Rodent Songs
The child woke screaming after sleep turned his sheets to writhing serpents. I lied and told him snakes ate the things in the walls, but the truth was that snakes wouldn’t touch them. Amid these new poverties, nothing discouraged the rodent palaver among the 2x4s. My daughter attempted to tame one and ended up in Ward B with an infection we were trying to kill on the installment plan, the Hippocratic Oath suspended for lack of payment. The exterminators had gone from phosphine to kerosene to light explosives, carrying sidearms to discourage the delinquents who skulked around hotwiring cars. Sometimes I sat on the front stoop, counting the foreclosed homes, the sunset unchanged while the empire beneath it crumbled. I heard the jingle of keys, my wife leaving for the hospital to keep watch over our daughter, who dreaded the green tint of the room at this hour, which matched the dinner brought by the orderly. She dreaded the groans of her roommate, dying of a graft that didn’t take. Climbing into our own bed alone seemed a betrayal, so I was heartened by the patter of footsteps in the hall. We sought safety in numbers, my son and I, drifting off to the claw-clatter of the new, emboldened rodent songs.
DAN PINKERTON
Fire Party
My house refused to stop burning, which was a shame because I had some really top-notch explosives in there, accelerants such as gasoline and lighter fluid, some jet fuel and grenades. The townspeople, myself among them, passed through stages, a grieving process where the fire was concerned. First we felt shocked and dismayed that the house, which had been a part of our community since 1973, was now a blistering inferno. Then we felt mild curiosity over different facets of the fire, like for instance who would have guessed a toilet could liquefy? Finally we accepted there was something sacred in the fire’s quest to soldier on in the face of pressurized water and fireman’s foam. We were—I’ll say it—drawn to things that behaved oddly, yet we also agreed there was nothing gimmicky or show-offy about the fire. Usually the person came first, then the flame to honor that person, but in this case the flame came first and the people followed, setting up lawn chairs, drawing strength from a blaze that peeled away strips of darkness like bandages after a facelift.
DAN PINKERTON
Opera, 2001
I am still a child, playing The Maid of the Mill loud from my mother’s laptop as my father, in the next room, cuts twenty-percent of his pinky off with a circular saw. I do not speak a word of German, but the opera singer’s voice is so loud that I understand. For Christmas that year, I buy my dad a pair of mittens with my small allowance. He laughs and laughs, wiggling his stumped pinky in the air. Beneath the mitten he is whole again. Schubert plays loudly in the back of my head—the crescendo whines like a circular saw, or a rusted swing.
C.W. BRYAN
Strawberries
A big, glass bowl of oranges with eight pleated butterflies—perfectly symmetrical etched along the side. The sunlight, with all the eagerness, and youth of morning pouring through each glass insect casts forty intersecting rainbows onto the deep brown landscape of the dining room table. Your thumb, dragging gently along the rim, as your tongue moves in contemplative circles behind a small smile. It is always summer in the fields of memory, and the strawberries dance ceaselessly toward you.
C.W. BRYAN
Paper Boat
I am open, sailing. I carry the azure wide, the glitter sun. Oars free, I tumble down the folds of my palms—through the center crease I glide, through the heartline I flow, I rush with the currents, pulse with the rocks. Rounding the river like a bowl, I float as paper, washi unfolding as skin that breathes. My hands are cupped, budding tulips. Stomata open, oarlocks empty, I am soft. Here I float, gentle here I wash a peach so quietly its skin does not peel, I rinse its fur and hug the flesh the juice so sweet in my mouth, I carry in my palms fresh rain and sip it and sip it, I lick the petals of daffodils, dandelions, sugar for stars, I guide my boat by the constellations on my chest, I hold my thoughts as a river holds a rock. I press my knuckles against the edges, strengthen the creases. I send a sailboat down my back and I race it, I race the leaves, I bloom, my spine and all the rest, I am the wind that slips through the sail that slips through the water that slips through the rock that settles and hush. I am the quiet, the whispered chatter of stream against shore. I am open, open, inside out, here the stream becomes a rock, and I am sweetness held firm in a palm.
LYANNE WANG
Thinning Hair
Thin, silk frays fall as strands. My mother’s hair thins. Like basins threading through the scalp. Her hair falls. Quietly I tread the stairs. Her head hangs from the top, deep into her legs. She does not know yet how deeply I love. My grandfather had a stroke and her hair tangles without sleep. Matted strings, black wires, eyes gray. On the phone my grandmother calls and tells her of wrong, of ambulances, hospitals. I see death falling beside her ear. I see my mother cry and I am helpless. The walls shift into something lesser than gray and will not return until Waigong relearns how to walk. Meanwhile I hang on to the sweetness of hope. Look at me, mother, and I will save you. I will give you the black of my hair. Her sister’s and brother’s deaths run through the bloodline in a shared scar. I tug at the crevice between her childhood and mine. I would give her the black of my hair, thick and ready to swallow. Meanwhile my Popo’s whispers hang in the air like white, and my mother books the next flight to Taiwan. I am next; thin holes press deeper and deeper, daughter after daughter.
LYANNE WANG
Dan Pinkerton lives in Urbandale, Iowa. His stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in Chicago Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, Subtropics, North American Review, Boulevard, New Orleans Review, Pleiades, Pinch, and Grist, among others. Additionally, his work has appeared in anthologies published by the editors of 32 Poems, Diagram, and No Tell Motel, as well as the 2008 edition of Best New American Voices, guest edited by Richard Bausch.
Dan has been the recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes, an AWP Intro Journals Award, and was a finalist for the 2006 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the 2016 Montana Prize in Fiction given by Cutbank, and the 2021 NORward Prize awarded by New Ohio Review. He has also been nominated for six Pushcart Prizes. Democracy of Noise is his first book.
C.W. Bryan is a student at Georgia State University. He lives in Atlanta, GA where he writes poetry, nonfiction and short fiction. He is currently writing his weekly series, Poetry is Plagiarism, with Sam Kilkenny at poetryispretentious.com. His debut chapbook Celine was published with Bottlecap Press in 2023.
Lyanne Wang is a sophomore at Wellesley College studying English and Peace & Justice Studies with a concentration in human rights law. She is an Assistant Poetry Editor at the literary journal Pithead Chapel and was a 2024 summer intern at The Writer’s Workout.
Cover Image: “Map of the Sea” by Olaus Magnus. Via the Library of Congress. Original here. Public domain.