Russel Swensen and What Happens Next
Russel Swensen is an American poet and fiction writer whose books include the chapbook Santa Ana and the poetry collection The Magic Kingdom. He earned an MFA in fiction from California Institute of the Arts and a doctorate in poetry from the University of Houston. His work has appeared in journals including Black Clock, Quarterly West, PANK, Third Coast, and Juked.
Issue 40 preserves two sections from What Happens Next. “Braxton” moves through scripture, death, desert, poison, darkness, coral, carrion, cormorants, and oil. “Erik” turns a wall-mounted cross into nectarine, wet paper, lightning, and song. The fragments anticipate the obsessions with memory, loss, religion, image, and emotional extremity that continue through Swensen’s later work.
Braxton
“It will be forever lost.” The voice rings out
& cracks
a teenage bell.
I thought you were in the bible.
That’s what death means. That you are in
the desert. The desert was made out of really
bad hymns.
I tried to break you out of the bible. It was
harder than jail.
It was a puzzle. I had to solve the bible.
I tried.
~
“The mind as well. Now that you have dropped
the carrion (the water
thick as muscle) you must pull from it
the same poison you put in. Now your words
do not limn the darkness— they
are— hard as coral, deeply stained. They
fester like cormorants
in Alaskan oil.”
Erik
The cross on the wall shines like
a nectarine, curls like wet paper. Christ is stretched out
on it:
a scribble of lightning— when he speaks
I think it will be you. The mouth twists open
a white song
drifts out like something from a fog machine—
it says
Books and later work
Black Lawrence Press documents Santa Ana, The Magic Kingdom, his education, awards, and publications. A later poem in Juked shows his work continuing into the 2020s.