Known Endings
To close out our summer issue, find the Pulp Literature Issue 47 poetry round-up below. Please enjoy these quiet poems by Jesse Keith Butler and Brian Palmu.
Find their opening stanzas below.
The Solarists
When I got you to watch Tarkovsky’s Solaris
for date night, and you fell asleep on the couch,
I wished I could say why I wanted to share this.
I know for you it was much too much
of the artful slow-crawl camera pans
and the thick subtitled monologues.
But for me the whole thing is how knowing ends
in the strangeness of it. See how the light fogs
Jesse Keith Butler is an Ottawa-based poet and the winner of the inaugural 2024 ESU Formal Verse Contest. His first book, The Living Law (Darkly Bright Press, 2024), is available wherever books are sold. Find his poem ‘Midlife Katabasis’ in Pulp Literature Issue 43, and learn more at jessekeithbutler.ca.
Alagoas Foliage-Gleaner
Not dominating the pale grasses
like the black rhino, nor dramatic
like a sprung jaguar, the bird vanished
before a forest of veiny sky.
Losers hunt by foot, waiting endlessly.
Air conditioning on, in a bower
of pixels, you’re free to download and hear
brief jagged rattlings of the gleaner.
Brian Palmu is a poet and critic currently living in Victoria, BC. His two poetry chapbooks are Sunset Mathematics (Frog Hollow Press, 2017) and Parade (Anstruther Press, 2024).
Leave a Reply