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      January 23, 2024Confluence of Rivers and MouthsLaren McClung

      Today I saw a woman on Spring Street
      with two black spaniels. She was crouching
      and whispering to them. The dogs
      took turns licking the woman on the mouth.
      This woman’s mouth was its own world.
      There are many worlds. We can enter them.
      I read that Frydek-Mistek is a natural gate
      into the mountains. One river empties
      into the mouth of another. I imagine you
      singing your nightingale song back
      in D.C. I forget little things. This is a way
      of surviving. I make imprints in the snow
      in my dreams aggressively, practice
      my blues-scales, collapse bridges,
      converse with my grandmother, walk
      into the water and keep walking.
      I don’t know how surviving things can
      better me, but I have many secrets.
      And secrets, I’m learning, are like sheets,
      or a shroud wrapped so tight it seems
      impossible to find the opening to get out.

      from #32 - Winter 2009

      Laren McClung

      “Lately I’ve been reading the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. She was part of a movement called Acmeism, which formed as a reaction against symbolism. The movement was concerned with poetry that moves through the use of association. Association opens ways between worlds, like the intersection of consciousness and subconsciousness, how one sound or image or thought conjures another entirely unrelated, like montage, like dreaming.”

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