Ben Meyerson | Near Enough

Near Enough: poems by Ben Meyerson. Number 9 in Volume 5 of our Editor’s Series:

The constricted sphere of life during southern Spain’s initial pandemic lockdown becomes a stage for history’s unfolding, which finds its expression on both local and global scales: the extractive accumulation of resources, the perpetuation of social injustice, the spatial arrangements arising from the threat of contagion, the reiterative excavation of cultural memory and the wrenching, attenuated call of flamenco song. Ben Meyerson gathers these themes into an ensemble whose articulation demonstrates how distance and proximity mediate one another across space and time to produce fluctuations between intimate collaboration and violence. These poems explore the contours of a solidarity that is always being sundered and reconstituted all at once. Set against the accretive monotony of crisis, they dig to disinter a new way of knowing in the places where mixture is also separation and a boundary is a broken bridge between what is already touching.

“Applause greets us when we enter into Ben Meyerson’s Near Enough. Songs sung through thin masks meet our ears. A river rushes by, sins and shames bobbing along its surface—to surpass us? To rest out of sight? Meyerson traces what it is and was like to be ‘always too close / and at too much distance.’ Put a chair up on the roof, read a while.

–Sarah Dowling, author of Entering Sappho

Publication:  June 19, 2023 [100 copies]
31 pages
ISBN 978-1-949333-98-5
$ 12.00

Ben Meyerson holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and currently splits his time between Toronto, Canada and Granada, Spain. His debut full-length poetry collection, entitled Seguiriyas, is forthcoming from Black Ocean Press in 2023. He is the author of three chapbooks: In a Past Life (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2016), Holcocene (Kelsay Books, 2018), and An Ecology of the Void (Above/Ground Press, 2019). His poems, translations and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in several journals, including Interim, Pank, Long Poem Magazine, Great River Review, The Inflectionist Review, Rust+Moth, and Pidgeonholes.

Future-Proofing

Time with you was a callus and a cocoon:
it slowed so that its circulation stilled mid-flow,
each path petrified in whorls on wood
and tinctured sediment—

night rested where it spread
on beds of shale and spun
silk before the sun came  
to pack   it down in sheets:

we lived there in the forestalled weave and churn
of stone, carved
and grown by habits of contact,
receptive to touch from within our chassis,
though deprived of it.

We did not think to protect ourselves
until what was to come
arrived—

all night we took pains to be permeable,
but when we awoke our breath was twine
and glacial rinds sloughed from the hillsides down
into our mouths, caching silt-trails
and spume on our tongues
in chalky hillocks to subsume
our saliva with grit
and milled debris:

we inhaled greedily.

To speak
we dug our way underneath the detritus,
then learned to frack affection:

we siphoned it up from our lungs
and dragged it forth, a small thrashing thing
with one leg caught in a snare’s teeth,
muscles liquefied with need beneath
the barren undergrowth—

it fattened on our scraps, paced,
bore our stares
so that we grew accustomed to the threat
and loosed it into the air between us.

[ Our thanks to Interim Magazine for first publishing this poem. ]