est. 2022
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ISSUE 5: AEVUM
[we highly recommend reading on desktop for optimal experience]
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MICHAEL BENNETT
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TARKOVSKY
Michael Bennett | Poetry
Tarkovsky wrote of distance
between what can be caught &
what falls through
our fingers.
The infinite cannot be made into matter.
Did he feel moments
like ghosts,
sinking rainwater
in loamy back-yards?
Each moment in the green,
like a nesting doll, pregnant
with itself in new frequencies. If
infinity does not find itself here, then where?
I want to hold those nesting dolls
again,
five years old: when I tore their heads
from their waists, their sisters entombed. They were
Madeleine's dolls.
​
Have words become nesting dolls?
​
The carpet stains in that old house
are made of
crystal,
hemmed in a pocket of no time.
​
Fear
always found me before: fear of Madeleine
unbound to me, fear that our child-heart union
would splinter
as the dolls splintered. Fear she’d sink
like
a ghost.
​
Still, some nights,
I read her:
words as pure and
sustaining as the wooden things we called home
and feel that all of this is unending.
The infinite cannot be made into matter,
But
it is possible to create an illusion.
BEHAVIORAL HEALTH
Michael Bennett | Poetry
His fingers scatter over residential jigsaw pieces
smelling antiseptic orange & gray
​
bone-legs crossed When his hands find one
small & chipped they scramble for its home
​
It’s a reclamation of power
I know to make broken things whole
​
Cars crumple into fire on the T.V. set
cabled above he turns his eyes
​
scab brown to the colored glass casing
sucking in the purple image-bath
​
Best part a pucker-eyed woman
whispers She drops onto plastic couch-wrap
​
puzzle half-formed lights switch off too awake
to go to that fucking room smile
dripping
​
between his teeth as the movie snaps to black
and leaves us in eely silence
​
crackling log-fires he sets
in the ribs of a muddy riverbank
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Michael Bennett is a queer writer and filmmaker based in Manhattan and Arlington, TX. His work has appeared in October Hill Magazine and eleven40seven Journal of the Arts.
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