Photo: Tiffany Bessire

Drift

by Joe Kane 

Inspired by Phantom Limb Company's Falling Out


(Written in response to Falling Out.)

Late, by myself, in the boat
of myself - Rumi

No stars out tonight. No moon.
The waves are reflecting the sky,
the gentleness of the sky.

I cup my hands and let
a dark pool gather,
black water, black air.

There are no fish tonight.
No pole. No hooks
with their questionable kindness.

No wet-muscled music of oars.
The oarlocks’ empty horns
look like wine glasses filled with sea.

The dark pool leaks, forms
constellations on the burden boards.
Sometimes hands are poor at holding.


About 
Joe Kane
J. Joseph Kane is the writing mentor for the Year at OZ youth cohort. He is the Program Director of The Porch's youth programming arm, SLANT (Student Literary Artists of Nashville, TN), and before moving to Nashville, he taught creative writing in Detroit Public Schools through Inside Out Literary Arts Project. Joe’s poems and stories have found homes in a number of magazines, including RHINO, Elimae, theEEEL, Clapboard House, The Splinter Generation, Cricket Online Review, Psychic Meatloaf, Temenos, Right Hand Pointing, Admit2, and the podcast Versify.
OZ Arts Nashville presents Art Wire: an ongoing collaboration between OZ Arts and The Porch in which 10 writers attend the OZ Arts performance season and respond to the presentations through original writing that is personal, playful, and deeply engaged. The OZ Arts 2019-2020 season offers each Art Wire Fellow a diverse array of inspiration, including innovative Japanese dance artist Hiroaki Umeda; a genre-bending presentation of Frankenstein by Chicago-based company Manual Cinema; and two emotionally raw works with Nashville's own professional dance company, New Dialect, just to name a few.

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