Two Poems
By Mario Chard
The Trick
of death to know if living
goes behind it like nothing has
behind a metaphor
to die to know it have
no way back to tell the rest
*
of rest to still turn back
to ask the sleeper
Are you sleeping to hear
who cannot speak to know
the answer then is Yes
Landscape of the Video Game
Before the poster in the firstborn’s former room
(two warplanes circling in a frozen doom
that never touched),
unmoved though the firstborn
grew,
unclaimed trophy left to scorn
the nextborn’s game,
Landscape,
before I drove
I dreamed of finding you.
Before I found the grove
of planted trees up Tapper’s Loop where I could stop
my first car in the shade,
before the night a cop
flashed his light there to catch the bodies in his beam
but let me dress,
I already learned to deem
the next stage earned by motion or its permanence
inside your screen;
already traded innocence
for pixelated speed,
the predetermined bet,
the race and track restored,
all my lives reset.
Mario Chard is the author of Land of Fire (Tupelo Press, 2018), winner of the Dorset Prize and the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry. Recent poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere. Winner of the “Discovery” Poetry Prize and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he lives in Atlanta, Georgia. You can follow him on Twitter @mariochard.
Art by Betty “Juniper” Kim
Betty “Juniper” Kim is a comics artist and writer currently pursuing an MFA at the Center for Cartoon Studies. Their work has recently appeared in Nashville Review, Black Warrior Review, Catapult, and SweetLit, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. You can find more of their work at bettyjkimportfolio.com, or say hello via Instagram @doodlingjuniper.