Please help the Black Earth Institute continue to make art and grow community so needed for our time. Donate now »

a literary journal published by the Black Earth Institute dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society

Ariel Resnikoff


apotropaic drain

a space appears in foot
steps dust kicks up the
steep wood ramp in
place of door—it cd be
a promenade if you give it
time, a plank, if not
what the greeks call
“warding off” in beit
shaan lewis reads the
signs off ancient mosaics
the hottest place on earth
supposedly, & annoyed
scalability in dimensions
of intersecting hands
prints dust does its job
obfuscates confused
coughing for laughter
squinting w pain


that tub was full of ghosts (kafka)

sweet aromatics un
hinge the metrics:
rum breath betty,
for example, my
cousin rezzy climbing
his lines two
by two into the ark, as i do
melancholy restarts
a crisis spills
open across seven
unseeded tubs, un
seen but smelt
borscht breath aerosol
floods scooches
leftward makes room
recording metrics
for new posterity
rum breath breathe
in, rummy cube
sideburns out
sabbatean seas leave
empty elijah’s cup runneth
under
unearthing
pleats, unnerving
cries,
peppering
prayers for
living
death rattling
curses


our permanent impermanence

some act of radical love
to read this poem knowing
v well you cannot go w
me, nor i w you, that every
person must go alone into
the unknown despite us
all having been here to
gether once

Share: 


Ariel Resnikoff’s most recent works include the poetry collection, Unnatural Bird Migrator (The Operating System, 2020), the chapbook, raisin in every bite (Furniture Press, 2022), and with Jerome Rothenberg, the translingual epistolary collaboration, A Paradise of Hearing (The Swan, 2021). His poetry and essays have been published widely and appear or are forthcoming in Boundary 2, Golden Handcuffs Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Dibur Journal, Caesura Magazine and Full Stop Quarterly. Ariel is a translator of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry and prose, and his own writing has been translated into German, Russian, Spanish and French. He has taught poetry, translation, creative nonfiction and multilingual diaspora writing at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (University of Pennsylvania), and at Columbia University Abroad. In 2019, he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania, and in 2020 he was selected as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Translingual Poetics.


©2024 Black Earth Institute. All rights reserved.  |  ISSN# 2327-784X  |  Site Admin