Where From

John Goodhue

picture phonics

a sound starting from nothing that reaches up to you in waves and bursts 
 and you among your realms of TV light 

some sudden demand wintry days end via sonic -alities

a law, it turns out, the pain in them is matter, if shared

if slant, a room just always above a brook and if above the room another 
 brook just always below a room above the brook beneath your feet

take x, ascribe it the polarity, the laws, the perspectives of stars
 perched above the lady tapping her wrist each time she feels
   negative space between the pigeons, thinks me, in the park

picture I, cambrian and cold and silver and with its governments 

its many times over frozen pond shore wherefrom 
 toward the edge of this late in today

with violin-swells and foxed loops, bats on distant air whir

like sines, dead words bonding too much of us, the sun.

On Speed and Being

John Goodhue

Everything’s said. Said this bandwidth’s sprung pneumatics
 into the ethics, the cross-talk.

A damage report’s twang thru pluvial static.

Said our awful love gets eaten like a field. Its vibration of frogs.

The other world’s the one whose moon we’re experiencing.

Said when we are promised what we are starved of we hear
spoons harmonizing, catfish like massive carrier-waves swallowing
 bird song.

Mind soloing in broken sound that makes one want to
think where butterflies might go in a thunderstorm and cannot.

Said desire inputs consciousness, escapes name shift.

Gain and rotation beginning to mean heat.
Heat beginning to mean central heating.

The patina with these hours, the empty hours, hours in this room with these words
 emptying their access.

Florid, fluorescent and tariffed earth.

Said it’s spring with small bees, natural atoms
 in a tight wind buckling under the work of categories.

Said you writing of the past is you not having begun what you need to.

You, bosonic, and you, mostly the motion of adding up
and of your hands, they trace motion tiringly in the false dropping
 of leaves.

Said the variable sound, a rush of jet sound, according to when the body is
 in inflection at its variable speed.

Index to index to arithmetic, what’s there is never

loud enough to communicate, is there thru distant shimmering   
 water
-striders and monocytes, happiness modeling boojum modeling
dust, hyacinths and orientation, bravado of sitting in traffic in living mostly
 in this dayglow.

 
 
 

about the writer

me.jpg

John Goodhue received an MFA from University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize, and The Daniel and Merrily Glosband Award in poetry. He currently serves as a contributing editor for jubilat. His work is forthcoming or can be found in Willow Springs, The Seattle Review, Poetry Northwest, Big Big Wednesday, Boxcar Poetry Review, Superstition Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. As well, a chapbook, A Room With This Light, will be published via Factory Hollow Press in early 2019. He resides in Portland, OR.