L’Oursin
How cute you looked, counting your miseries before they were upon you. My body stretched out by the lens. Last night caught fire on a liminal level, projecting the fantasy onto the ruins of the earth, a sieve that drew down all vanity, all skullduggery & landscape in equal measure. Is it frightening in cloud city? For this you are nothing but an impasse, light’s devoured surface, an attenuating glance. What we see is not what we’ve gotten once before, but what we could not hold onto long enough to forget.
Eliot Cardinaux is a poet, pianist, composer, and translator working at the intersection of the lyric and improvised music. The author of On the Long Blue Night (Dos Madres, 2023), Eliot has produced over a dozen albums, including American Thicket, Sweet Beyond Witness, Pavane, and Out of Our Systems. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in music from the New England Conservatory, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Eliot’s poems and translations have appeared in journals such as California Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, Meridian, Jacket2, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He is also the sole founder and editor of The Bodily Press.