Issue #31.11 Three Poems by Matt Turner
from 6AMING
8:14-8:23
thruway – blooming there, surprise – broadened every direction a kind of openness, flat or tall, for habitation
like a maze across a face. Mouth in a permanent twitch – rection – set in, in every time – lazily the bus coming to a halt, turning around the military arts troupe theatre the water basin the crap scenery –
not a moment too soon, or a moment at all – litho – on the corner
8:51-8:56
wind gone, only a body can move it eyes, every time, on them the moment glued in color and fiber then relief, every time a passerby they all ascend, but no, the rest fall out divided from the participants then, grappling
in graphite, climbing the bleachers not today, probably, or ever again a synthesis, a wall, an insists
10:44-10:49
symbol – gate – guards – entrance
had not, of course, heard lamp posts surrounding the field a great lantern in the middle, in snow the grime over each tile – façade cooperative – staircase broadening the further up the building goes
natural light, at nighttime footsteps stiller, boisterous laughter somehow the puncture is on the outside inside like the center of a volcano
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Matt Turner lives in New York, where he works as a freelance translator and copy editor. He is the author of four poetry collections: The Places (BlazeVOX 2025), Slab Phases (BlazeVOX 2022; described by Forrest Gander as “like voltaic charges”), Wave 9: Collages (Flying Islands 2020) and Not Moving (Broken Sleep 2019), as well as three chapbooks, including the prose memoir of his dog Xiao Chou, Be Your Dog (The Economy 2022). He is also the translator or co-translator of around a dozen books from Chinese, focusing on figures of China’s contemporary avant-garde and notably including work by Yan Jun, Ou Ning, and Wan Xia. His translation of modernist Lu Xun’s Weeds, the first English translation in 40 years, was called by Yunte Huang “a daring leap across the linguistic abyss.” Essays and reviews have appeared in Bookforum, Cha (Hong Kong), Heichi (Beijing), Hyperallergic Weekend (New York) and other journals. Poems from 6AMING have appeared in Pamenar, Voice & Verse, and Antiphony.
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