MxT

All the gods know is destinations. I have raised

A glass, my eye, your hook. Let’s face it, the world

Is a shrinking place and hungry: too much grief

To feed. I float away from you on hard

Covers. I step out on the stacked hours. Words

If they were soil how I would throw them back into the

Compost pile and wait for spring. Those ‘this is how

It is,’ speeches appear and later diamonds soft as bullets.

I went to the library looking to scaffold my thoughts.

Sure, now you say Lucretius. Intelligence is so often

Hindsight. Outside Holly Golightly’s townhouse

There are taxis. The end of me, or you, is of no concern.

Frederick Seidel anoints me with the head of his penis.

It is soft as a chamois and spreads like egg across my scalp.

MxT, or ‘Memory x Time,’ is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful.

Praise for Sina Queyras’s previous books:

'Eclectic engagements characterize Queyras's work, but any suggestion of characterization of her work immediately brings a morphing to something new, intelligent, and provocative ... Sina Queyras is a poet to read and reckon with.' – Lambda Literary Review

'As a poet, Queyras is secretly romantic, writing with lyricism and a voice that's unafraid of sentiment or emotion ... Queyras's words spark like pickaxes on old asphalt.' – Eye Weekly (on Expressway)