Featured Poet: David Pavelich

David Pavelich lives in Chicago, where he works at the University of Chicago as a special collections librarian and bibliographer for contemporary and modern poetry.

He edits and publishes Answer Tag chapbooks and broadsides in limited editions. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Antennae, Aufgabe, Bird Dog, LVNG, and other journals, and prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Chattahoochee Review, Crayon, and The Progressive Librarian. Chapbooks of his poems have been published by Cuneiform Press and Bronze Skull Press.

WEST

for Jesse Seldess


This could be the way
of the building back,

without size
the early line

pulled back to the copper
neighborhood.

Open a corner.
The world of air,

the children’s field,
a wall of insulation

without size.
Lift up your distance –

this could be the way
of the building forward,

this could be a kind of
made wood.



THE DANDELION COPY


An emphasis of stripes is
a simple machine.

Equal is light blue
into the pocket,

the picture of
the viceroy.

We are all healed up
after all,

three times removed.
The still to live,

the wind, the awning,
the roots of our cuttings.

This one, a moving cloud,
is already a sketch of rain.



“FOR THE MOMENT WE CAN’T SEE THE FACES”


Numbers into shuttle
makes the message:

and when it was done
it was done.

Of the thousands,
a grasshopper.

Of the couple in tandem
a grasshopper.

There are more affordances
for a fold on the grain,

that these threads
might not be broken.

Sand in the struggle,
in height, in forward,

the grain joins the stream.
And when it was done,

the thousands.



NOONS

Maybe because
they were simple

the gray areas
of the pull

cut across
some rainbow –

of reaching
the back reveals

the braid that you carry
is another weave

of constraint

NATURAL BRIDGE [Previously appeared in Bird Dog]


Some barn
astronomy,

that the same model,
same hopefulness

grows stronger.
A three-cornered barn

leans into the lawn, is lawn –
grows a lawn of barnlight,

summerblue.
Only give it circles

and given back around
surround the sycamore.