“Fascism”

Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This remarkable ekphrastic poem doesn’t need much of an introduction because of its stark title and indebtedness to the Malevich painting. I admire its unfolding syntax and its unflinching voice as it explores the figurative ocean of the painting’s blackness.

Listen to Strohschein read the poem:

Fascism

inspired by Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 painting, Black Square

The flat black attack lands on hover-pad of white while not devouring it completely, not crushing it to oblivion because its wholeness (we think) can never completely capture the infinite white, & in such times, the thin blank beach is survival, & so we run around the edges playing, building sandcastles, erasing thoughts of what could destroy us, playing in a world where what we fear flows to flood: memories of split plastic toys—the putrid pail, the shellacked shovel—washing us away in a new terrible tide, oil-spilt ocean, ocean of cowardice, ocean of willing submission, ocean of I could never imagine, ocean of a million regrets, ocean of the charred body, ocean of foundered laws & civil liberties, ocean of the minority, ocean of disappearances, ocean of tribunals, ocean of inconceivable loss, ocean of inexcusable historical blindness, ocean of Jesus?, ocean of Again?, ocean turned black.