Fogged Clarity Podcast

Cast to the corner like punished women, or girls relieved to be dismissed for now for five days for less for more for body’s unholy action through no willed action, far from Book, Verses left untouched, God’s Pages unsullied with our fingers unstained—why assign this fluid with morality, no morality, bearer of DNA how does… More

My guide and I first purified before the sacrifice, but can you be purified I asked her without being eliminated or erased? My guide said it’s always but with you, why can’t you just archive the whiteness or curate the liquidity of the city and play your music or whatever you do? Here, she said,… More

A softer sound than the crude x-ray chirp of a sparrow or blue-bellied finch. Violet crowned, I can never not hunger for things less tethered to earth. It is through speed and lightness that time slows. Beyond that red-billed rhythm, I imagine your inner weather is nothing but wind, an irregular albino sighted against a… More

Whitman heard the “bustle of growing wheat” [I believe him] as he loafed in the grass in Camden, one ear to the earth enormous with corpses and vascular tissue, hairy roots of cabbages, horseshit enriching the Great Experiment – the other ear heard the “orbic flex” of a tenor and the soprano and ghosts ravishing… More

What about the dew- sodden morning, eyes open to the already turning earth? Or batter blinking in the pan? Because today we have nowhere to be. These movements are true. They’re made by hands toward a deer in the whistle grass. It is somewhere within arms reach and there’s no way to know in which… More

Nettles could replace the cabbage, the salt and saffron milk-caps halved and cut with stock, water, proportions intuited and spun wetly over flame. My infant grandmother satcheled to the left hip, warmed into consuming sleep while soup thickens kitchen air. Cities are fled: Moscow and Vyazma, my grandmother in the same satchel spirited to Bryansk,… More

If I told you bagging groceries to pay for community college tuition and a gym membership made me feel some kind of glamorous it would be mostly honest and mostly, as I was then, ignorant of any real responsibility outside of anthropology text books and the push/pull full-body lift split I’d adopted from a thick… More

First little reelings of knowing outer space is inner— bad sci-fi movie where humans are fleas, or motes of shadow in the amoeba’s eye(lessness).    I am fairly functional   for a spirit walking around in a body. I don’t listen to messages, merely transcribe them, as though the mind is a sphere scraping other moving… More

after Jim Harrison There is a god of small thunder in my chest, pounding commandments: whiskey, birds, women, feed the strays. His appetite grows as I watch Manitou twins or breakers in Grand Traverse. He reminds me blood is still red without air and Escanaba is a decent drive if you’ve been drinking. I listen… More

In winter, she comes to visit. Following me around the house, asking questions with your mouth. She rests your chin on my head. After I’ve said goodnight, she roots around for you, digging for lost Christmas ornaments, state fair plush toys, faded Polaroids of us at Mammoth Cave, you at Cedar Point. She ferrets out… More

count the times the police appeared in my living room, barged in and bobbed like jellyfish on the tangible resentment of my mother       the sea of her        crashing on herself       my mother of get in their faces and tell them where to go assault on an officer      broke her       delicate wrist      said it caused arrest in… More

As beautiful as it is relevant, here’s Will Oldham performing his new song, “In Good Faith”. LYRICS In good faith: Rocks are buried beneath tons of earth to become diamonds With the gift of the sunlight the kudzu vine goes climbing I open my heart to a world not of my making We open our… More

Dreams refuse to wake with us. They prefer the easy rewrites of sleep to the alarms and showers of daily routine. And who can blame them? The noise of this daylight, its empty oaths, grind so hard into the skull, the persistent weight of my own head against the pillow makes that weightless world a… More

I will take joy from wherever it comes. I will wring it out of my grief. I will seize it from my enemies. Joy has no identity, no politics, no beliefs. It is not deterred by my righteous indignation. I will find hope is in its presence, not some bird in my future. God gives… More

A bank’s clean limestone façade, and inside, just past the marble columns, beneath the perfect glass dome, the carnival frenzies. Everyone he’s known or lost or longed for forced to wear feathery masks. He loves excess, but only in the way a flood loves excess—the destructive miracle of it, so much of what permits a… More

Sure, I want to believe a poem can block a bullet too that a poem could save me at the end of the world, my bug-out bag teeming with “Good Bones.” My friend’s husband sells guns. He’s a republican. His sales boom under a democratic president, and sometimes he feels strange-weird about making money off… More

Author Rick Ewing discusses his 5 years spent as a homeless alcoholic on the streets of New Jersey, and how they inspired his first novella. More

And then it turns cold, fall, the sky full of upside-down ships, and wind, the grass turning a bright but pale shade of green, sunlight between stark clouds, no more yellow of daffodils, some window plastic flutters, it’s coming, the wonderful specter of pothole-filled roads, a warm car, gloved hands on a steering wheel, tires… More

An interview with poet and author Paisley Rekdal appearing in the Spring 2016 issue of Fogged Clarity. More

Canadian poet & author Matt Rader sits down with Tarn Painter-MacArthur to discuss weaving temporalities, his childhood caretaker, and his forthcoming collection, Desecrations. TRANSCRIPTION Tarn MacArthur: Hello and welcome to another Fogged Clarity interview, I’m Tarn MacArthur, and we’re lucky to have the poet and author Matt Rader with us today. Matt, good to see… More