Nathan Hoks, Moony Days of Being

 

Dead Julia Syndrome

If it is possible to lick your own elbow
Why did Julia kill herself?
I thought the man with the radish
Would warm her ribcage
But the bleeding finger became a distraction
And the flogged horse sent us all spinning
Down the village well of internal turmoil—
So I went into the mustard field
To sweet myself away with the dusk
And I went onto the sunny patio
To sear memory out of my scalp
But I merely scared away the robins 

If it is possible to inspect the back of your neck
If it is possible to feel a protein
Enter the slog and ooze of the bloodstream
Why kill anything at all?
My coffee’s cold, my heart runneth dry
Another day another coffin makes
Yellow chicks fluff up beneath warm lab lights
I take my bloody finger to the other room
Where the radio won’t reach us
Where the shades blackout the light
Where a forest may spring from Julia

The fourth full-length poetry title by Chicago poet Nathan Hoks, but the first I’ve seen, is Moony Days of Being (Boston MA/Chicago IL: Black Ocean, 2026), a collection that follows The Narrow Circle (Penguin, 2013), Reveilles (Salt Publishing, 2010) and Nests in Air (Black Ocean, 2021). Moony Days of Being is a collection of sharp, first-person lyric narratives that punch, and parry; are occasionally odd, with surreal, absurdist twists. “I turned up my headphones and stroked my ermine collar.” he writes, as part of “Self-Portrait on the Go,” “I could sense no texture / Only numb gray nerves as the ultra-light car doors / Opened and closed continuously for several hours.” Offering an absurdist lyric with, at times, dark undertones, there are echoes reminiscent in Hoks’ work of American poets such as that of fellow Chicagoan, Benjamin Niespodziany [see my review of his latest] and fellow Black Ocean press-mate, Zachary Schomburg [see my review of his latest]. “Once you accept the basic pointlessness / Of life,” begins the poem “Self-Portrait as Ancient Mariner,” “the vomiting phantasmagoria / Crashes down to its earth-smudged abundance / I will insert line breaks later—for now / The thing is to listen to the heart murmur / The tale of the broken mermaid / I discovered while kayaking the city’s river, / She was delightfully moored [.]”