Sunday, June 11, 2023 “Fugue | 47: Some Kinda Grail Problem” by Joe Hall
Lamp, the flowering column, in the mist, in the axiom, you sit
in your red armor, the loose prism that peels from light
in moon-smashed foil, playing your cards on a
table of mist, we are in those cards
mothers, tyrannicides, mechanics
you hold the city like a puzzle box to your ear
in the moon-smashed mist, fingers testing
its surfaces, red armor under
a flowering tree split by honeyless bees
in a cold summer, rivers of cellophane, and a desire
that’s real, to choose between signs suspended
among vegetation made out to be tragic, lamp, flowering
column, drunk cask of lights, or the red armor
cross-legged under the jungle gym
mothers, tyrannicides, mechanics
great alabaster hull of a planet
great honeyless planet
great planet of smoke
About the Poet
photo credit Lianna Hogan
Joe Hall is an educator and the author of six collections of poems: “Pigafetta Is My Wife” (2010), “The Devotional Poems” (2013), “Someone’s Utopia” (Black Ocean Press, 2018) and “Fugue & Strike” (Black Ocean Press, 2023) in which this poem appears. With Chad Hardy, he co-authored “The Container Store, Vols I & II” (2012). With Cheryl Quimba, he co-authored the chapbook “May I Softly Walk” (2014).
Hall has performed and delivered talks nationally at universities, living rooms, squats, and/or rivers in most of the 50 states as well as Canada and Washington, DC. He participates in Hostile Books, a publishing collective dedicated to radical materiality, with Ryan Kaveh Sheldon and Angela Veronica Wong. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at St. Bonaventure University. He has taught community based creative writing workshops through the Worker Center in Buffalo and Just Buffalo Literary Center. His college teaching experience includes all levels of undergraduate creative writing and environmental literature.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.