FORTUNA
To rub the terrycloth sleeper
between thumb and finger
threadown and washworn
sfumato blue and still
warm from the infant still
warm in the dream-- dirty laundry
-- while on the Grand Canal
we row perplexed gondolas
beneath a rinsewater sky
already darkening with the dim hint of itself
microfinance microplastics clinging in fat
soupy strands. Miss Money,
tho summoned, you do not appear
but lower your glass bowl
so our breaths go thick and cloud,
sfumato, the dome of the sky
will we asphixiate or drown or will you tap it
with a single nail and watch it fall
apart in art
that
pointed pattern that
pattern of blows
falls in rhythm
that's how we know
something exists there beyond the edge of perception
if we can only detect it
coming back in waves
might be an artefact of our tin-pan attempts to hear it
tremor in the wire
our own mammalian brain
and our own planet works that way
crashing back in waves
our credit
our crickets
our circadia
our cloud
into which we have dumped our dreams
of money
yet you Miss Money
withdraw
like a starlet into the arms
of her lawyers your
wee metatarsal flashes at last from your sandalstrap
as you turn away
as turning away
is the signature of a goddess
crashing back in waves-
nightwatch, nightcat, nightcatch blue--
as a fishscale will first shine in the moon then
turn in the sun
as every day the sun itself
shines and turns at its peak
strangled in the sky by its own chariot reins
like a king crab hauled up in a trap
waves its claw and shakes the cage
its eyes on their stalks roll in rage
haw haw what folly but meanwhile you
are no
where to be seen
tho my stalks revolve
and I shake the cage
of myself what
are you
when you conceal
-ed carry
yourself off
and drop yourself down a drain
you teach us nothing
on earth
is like you
selfsame
on earth
no self without likeness
Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. McSweeney’s recent book, Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020), was called “frightening and brilliant” by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker and earned her the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her 2014 essay collection, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, is widely regarded as a visionary work of eco-criticism.Her debut poetry volume, The Red Bird, inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001, while her verse play, Dead Youth, or the Leaks, inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Artists in 2014. With Carmen Maria Machado, she was the guest editor of Best American Experimental Writing 2020. She also collaborated with Don Mee Choi on translations of two short stories by Korean modernist Yi Sang, featured in Yi Sang: Selected Works from Wave Books alongside translations by Jack Jung and Sawako Nakayasu (2020). With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books which has built readerships for a diverse array of US and international authors from Griffin Prize winners Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi to Daniel Borzutzky and Raúl Zurita to Jane Wong, Destiny Hemphill and Valerie Hsuing. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at Notre Dame. Her most recent books are Death Styles (2024) and Radiations of War (2025), a collaboration with Ukrainian photographer Yana Kononova for which she wrote the text.