Michael Prihoda

Michael Prihoda

Issue 18

10

the hospitals
reek

of meat.

the recollection
of toil

empty of hope.

and!
the screams.

when grief                      is active

and halfway
up

the steps.

Source & Method

This poem is a redactions of Geraldine Brooks’s March. The text comes from a single page, 10, and that page number is the title of this poem. This is similar to blackout work, except that I have lifted the words in the order they appear and given a more poetic arrangement than traditional blackout allows.

Michael Prihoda lives in central Indiana. He is the founding editor of After the Pause, an experimental literary magazine and small press. His work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Anthology and he is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Out of the Sky (Hester Glock, 2019).

Photo is remixed by Dale Wisely from source photo by Gilberto Olimpio.

Every Step by Michael Prihoda

Issue 13

the interval
of anticipation,

of severed
connections.

the identity
so lonely,

the window
intact

in the visible
sliver of losing interest.

maybe thinking
rustled the suitcase

the door locking
above a whisper.

dialogue,
close-ups,

wary to know
every step.

Source: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man.

Michael Prihoda is a poet, editor, and teacher living in central Indiana. He is the editor of After the Pause, an experimental literary magazine and small press. His work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. He is the author of eight poetry collections, the most recent of which is Years Without Room (Weasel Press, 2018).

 

Visible Cities By Michael Prihoda

Issue 8

i.
leaving
streets golden,

this evening
growing from envy

ii.
wild desire
for a city

where
hesitating

encounters
brawls.

the city
of difference,

the dreamed-of man
seated in memories.

iii.
vain bastions,
the streets like scales.
the same relationships
between the distance
of swaying feet
and a firing gunboat.
the hundredth story
of illegitimate memories.
the city, a sponge, expands
a description of its past,
written in windows,
banisters, antennae, flags,
scratches, scrolls.

 

Source: Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Michael Prihoda is a poet and artist living in the Midwest. He is founding editor of After the Pause and his work can be found in various journals in print and around the web. He loves llamas and the moments life makes him smile.

Untitled by Michael Prihoda

Issue 5

3
when he woke in the woods,
nights dark beyond darkness.
the onset of dimming,
looked for any light,
there was none,
lost among the inward parts
of some granitic beast.
the earth of years
without room.

4
alabaster bones
cast up in the beating heart.
the brain pulsed a bell
swung,
loped,
lurched,
soundlessly

godless.
he wasn’t sure,
a calendar moving south.
there’d be no here

then everything
paling
in loose segments
looking for any movement,
smoke,
cotton

5
holding the land of God.
folded it, carried it,
spread the small tarp.
this was not a safe place,
essential things
to abandon

6
the wasted country
empty, precise,
a burden of okay.

they crossed the weeds
the broken asphalt apron,
the odor of windows intact

 

Source Text: The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Michael Prihoda is a poet and artist living in the Midwest. He is founding editor of After the Pause and his work can be found in various journals in print and around the web. He loves llamas and the moments life makes him smile.