To Lift

by Paul Cunningham

“All I’ve done is followed the action of the verb, lifted the thing up, and I have what I consider to be a sculptural form.” — Richard Serra

to dye a cloak
in swan-black
is to always lift bells
from the towering floor
mirror of the sky

to wear heavy rubber is
to weep a long verb’s thread
drag-high and darkly
on a sleaze of
leather garland

draped, swagged, scarred
he — Spring — knows how
to flower with luxuriance
with supermarket
imagination

a price-gouged eye
a morgue-anonymous eye
a clot slosh copse
of the latest dust-green
and there you are, ceiling

with all the flies, future

Paul Cunningham co-manages Action Books. He is the author of Brillo (forthcoming from Lavender Ink), Sociocide at the 24/7 (DIAGRAM, 2025), and two titles from Schism Press: Fall Garment (2022) and The House of the Tree of Sores (2020). He is one of seven collaborators in Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s Ancient Algorithms (Sarabande Books, 2025). His translation of Sara Tuss Efrik’s play Danse Macabre Piggies was anthologized in Experimental Writing: A Guidebook and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). Cunningham currently manages the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame where he also teaches.

Image credit:

Raffaele Mainella, “plate from Nos invisibles” from Nos invisibles. by Charles d’Orino. Paris: Bibliothèque Chacornac, 1907. Available at: https://www.archive.org