The Definition of Soft Fascination

polyphonic
as a frog heart
beating without the frog

and hearts of different sizes
bumping around
inside it

it is best
the sound of the Atlantic
entering a bungalow

from around
a Basque mountain
the old way

windows facing inland
bay’s wind at my back
wakes me looking into dirt

I go trek
and find the coast
I live on

salty wafer of air
cuts early through the bedroom
its rush ricocheting

a blue mind
state while in or near or
under water

that semi-structured white noise
we cling to sort of
soft fascinated

not red mind
overloaded by traffic’s lurch
and connected

so far into I’m
out of it
like a city

or that old phrase
we are
because we were

 
Daniel Moysaenko

Daniel Moysaenko is a Ukrainian American poet and recipient of awards and fellowships from Emory University, the Academy of American Poets, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he earned his MFA. Poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. And critical writing has appeared in journals such as Chicago Review, Harvard Review, and Kenyon Review. He holds a PhD in poetry from Florida State University and lives in Ohio's Chagrin Valley.

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Residuals

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4 poems from the sequence "test—flux"