Beth Bachmann is the author of three books, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press: Temper (2009), Do Not Rise (2015), and CEASE (2018). A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry and VQR’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry, she lives in Nashville and New York City.
There must’ve been some incident, something to push both Dickinson and Proust into isolation, the horse thought as a student, but now he thinks time and immortality require one’s full attention.
Time is the distance between birth and death. Parallel universes appear in real time on your screen. Place is an illusion. For instance, I am in the Palace of Versailles.
Rats can laugh, but the dogs aren’t smiling: they’re hooked on oxytocin, which rises when we lock eyes with one another. Oxytocin is not dissimilar to OxyContin, an opioid analgesic which can result in a similar sense of euphoria or attachment.
Your heart is like an island, like a bomb chambered for containment and you should handle my heart like a rare species of flower that grows only here, like a thing that can destroy.
The Gold Codes are the launch codes the president must keep on his person to initiate a nuclear strike.
Nicknamed “the biscuit,” there’s something domestic about it, as though nuclear attack were akin to pressing the soft flesh of a doughboy, the biscuits rising in the oven like mushroom clouds, mother singing.
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