Read “The Musing Gaze: a conversation with Chad Parmenter” here.
Your form—framed by my small hands, that you called “dangerous to know”—looked so like a fever dream of a tree to me. The truth of the universe is ruin—it insists—but out of the ruin the new—your core. I was never there.
The cypress on the broken rock overlook above the waves, where I find my wide eye flying, free of here, of us, holds—in its fire-scoured trunk—the likeness of fire and of our inner visions of outer space—hard stars, matte night, everything severing everything in its moving to be free.
Chad Parmenter’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, and Harvard Review. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri, and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Niagara University.