TERRIBLE ANGELS

Christopher Kazar Janigian

Angelus Novus

Exiting the wax, the strings
Around an iron rack are new and thick—in this dipping
There is punishment, yes.
Peel: The flower omits
The soil it’s on. Peel: A seed dissolves in water, green-lighting
It.
It feels like someone smoothed every ripple
Off an inchworm—it leaves
My sleep in a clutch like a gleaner’s.
I have arranged all my indigo bowls
In a circle: friend,
Who could use you?

Razor Cuts Soap
Odd Blue Apple, Cored
Pigment Covers Completely
Cubes Slide Off Smoothly

Iridescent Slime Squeeze
Incredible Melting Metal
Spooky Gloss Fill
Crisp Pops for Relaxation

Amazing Horse Carving
Mesmerizing Glaze Loop
Mesmerizing Bath Fizz
Mesmerizing Candle

It is a cake-flat wish I make
Toward a star’s limited throb, bendingly
And taking.
In the fog the carnation in the night
Stands up like a finger. When I woke it wasn’t there.
Imprint: storm on sky:
Spiral from a downward perspective but I am looking up.
It is noon
October 1st and somewhere
Gusts lash bushels of wheat. There’s pleasure in this—
How they gather information,
How a lion searches through foam.
A monk stands anxiously
folding his red sheet.
Jugular, octagon, octagon.

Kara Kendall

Emilia (from Teorema)

There is a burning sensation that falls away in context. I need my fist around the heat. What’s visible is a kind of framed penetration and I’d open the screen but this bat turned rake when my face fell away. From the ground that feeling becomes a situation and perpetually finds you collecting things fallen. Leaves, emptying a circular shape. Euphoria swallowed by the map, says you’re here and not there. Working, with family, under the tree, eaten by your neighbors, your cracking throat over explanation. Over there is momentum that pulls back from language, situation, that pumps the blood of the second. What I want is to breed suspension. Where burning passes through and through.

I painted context as a deserted friction. The hollowness occupied a protruding thread. Dense and overtly guarded. My skin spreads a puddle over glass. The armor gave me sweats, the age I wore and those that recognized me. I’m stuck in the dent divided by heat and undecided form. Can I aim towards urgency? Rhetoric clinging like shy children. I walk my dents and sky scrapes my head.

Weil and Wenders

And the moments when there is so much I the skin incinerates and you penetrate the air with movement. The trees say you. The air clocks out a perimeter. You ask how to hold it. You ask how much time do I have? These two questions, Am I small or am I far? Is it close or is it large? Bliss as the perception of both. Weil argues bliss is disappearance. Wender’s bliss is retrieving a confiscated carcass. Unused armor. I don’t use perfect sparingly. It would be easier to write a letter. To look at you and start walking closer. To use your skin as edges and plaster my belongings against your eyes. But you retaliated against bliss. The sun that is large, to be close is to be scorched. To be close to far is forgetting. I’m asking how to look shorter. Mediation is suggestion. Awareness is apology. Raking space is in a sense about gathering and another about texture. Sedgwick’s texture of before language. “First thought, best thought.”

But it’s an awful thrusting, a blank hold received from behind with no greeting. So gathering is 500 hundred hands and portioned words for touching 500 hundred things. Sanctioned titles tilting towards those hierarchies. Overarching form is perceived protection.

“the taciturn chamber’s gaze”

I folded bricks and propped my knees in pockets of dust. Chimes slung along my fingers. Fingers: wrinkled scaffolds drafting songs. Sticks dipped in sand. Lapping the drum. Perfect air grabs my ears. Open. Lick. Salt. Wet field and clouds walking their afternoon. Clasped the inhale of my window, rotting skin dripping a sink sound.

Texture scratches my eyes and simple purple stretches into pixels. Growing corners collapse in my secret. I arrange, hammer, long lines, fossiled feet. Building the carcass on my lap, take my hand, trade me pixels for sleeves. Redress. Dawn is spitting. Arriving, the warm lick of sluggish walls greeting my evening of contortion.

Alex Jane Cope

LUCKY CLOUD

"Récompensant ma patience, peut-être qu’un ange égaré me demandera quelle est sa route”

“Rewarding my patience, perhaps a wandering angel will ask me which way to go”

- Claude Cahun, Aveux non avenus

The angel turns left down

the highway of lost names

And I’m just another entry

in the catalog

Wandering soul

in the hub

of a toll booth or a train station

Loose change

My ticket for splendors

Egaré: wandering, lost, led

Astray

The angel prays for another

angel and taps the roof

as they run a red light

Murmuration

pink in the sky

I count my lucky clouds

✹

“Le jour de là-haut nécessitait sa nuit; mais sa lumière correspondait exactement aux ténèbres angéliques”

The birth chart creases in two

Angelic shades of day and night

The more I look ahead

The less I see behind

I ran into an old flame last night

on their birthday

Even though it is Aquarius season

in the waking world

and their sun

is in Libra

Do you remember the last time we met here?

They asked,

We were gossiping just like this

while your neighbor trimmed

a bouquet of sunflowers and gooseberries

Of course,

I said,

The flowers are still

in my bedroom.

✹

“L’esprit souffle: pigeon vole, prison vole, nations volent…”

Voler: to fly, to steal

The spirit breathes: pigeons steal, prisons steal, nations steal

The angel steels

time, hovering in velvetine greys

and the silky intimacy

of a used stocking

My queer angel of history

Patched wings in a threadbare sky,

Your lyre worn

to the bone

Outside the cemetery, in a wig and wool cap,

you slip anti-fascist flyers

onto car windshields,

into cartons of cigarettes

Jersey, 1942

It is by chance I found you paging

through a dictionary of women artists

in my high school library

while the army recruited Christian youth in the cafeteria

West Michigan, 2002

You have been waiting for me

all along

a spool

of thread

between millennia

My back

to yours, I retrace

your steps

The pile of debris

grows skyward

✹

“Un papillon tardif, du brillant de son vol éphémère a mis une lueur de folie dans mes yeux”

A glimmer of madness

like an angel’s trumpet

creamsicle orange

The phonograph bellows

for a nightshade heart

Lost in sleep

They say the dream street

never stays the same, but tessellates

Algorithmically

Paprika Papillon

breaches the firewall

We walk this street that

is traced by affect

Whistling stranger outside

the doner kebab

My angel craves iron like

The rest of us

The smell of grease soaked

wrappers

They lick their

lips for another round of flânerie

To find the 24 hour

pharmacy,

I tell them, Go

straight until you see

the neon green cross

& then you know you will have

arrived

*This piece contains quotes and paraphrasing of work by Claude Cahun, Arthur Russell, and Walter Benjamin.