PAUL CUNNINGHAM, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW

unstoppable grave

               unstoppable grave
               look away, finish your wine
               I tell myself, I
               drink lead from the sink,
instead, I imagine sitting on the edge of your bed for the last
time, if you were still alive I would open your drapes tomorrow
morning, always closed, I would open your drapes, if you were still
alive you would make us potato soup in the kitchen with the light
filled with downpour, the upstairs attic filled with downpour,
the falling planets and incendiary hail, swords of the cosmos, you
would make us potato soup in the light of the ceiling leak, a downpour
of hazardous light, a fire hazard in the night of my eyes, I will never
forget your calamitous love, our plutonium dancecraze nights.

Paul Cunningham on “unstoppable grave“:

The poem “unstoppable grave” is an excerpt from a larger project called Per Megawatt Hour. In 2021, I lost someone I loved very much. One of the last meals we ever had together was homemade potato soup. The roof of his attic leaked whenever it stormed, which resulted in the kitchen’s ceiling light sometimes filling with water. I fell into a deep depression shortly after this person’s unexpected passing. After he passed, I began writing feverishly for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. One night, I randomly watched a documentary called The Toxic Pigs of Fukushima (2020). Shortly after, I began thinking through my grief in new ways. At the time, I was also reading The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, which was recommended to me by the poet Mike Young prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is now not only one of my favorite books, but it actually helped me to write these deeply personal poems.

Paul Cunningham currently manages the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame, where he also co-manages Action Books, an international press for poetry and translation. He is the recipient of the 2021 Diann Blakely Poetry Prize and the 2015 Sparks Prize Fellowship. He is the author of Fall Garment (Schism Press, 2022) and The House of the Tree of Sores (Schism Press, 2020). From the Swedish, he is the translator of Helena Österlund’s Words (OOMPH! Press, 2019). He has also translated two chapbooks by Sara Tuss Efrik: Automanias: Selected Poems (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2016) and The Night’s Belly (Toad Press, 2016). His most recent poetry chapbook is The Inmost (Carrion Bloom Books, 2020). His interests include literary translation in theory and practice, decadent poetics, and ecocritical studies. He is also a coordinator of the International Network of Comparative Humanities (INCH), funded by Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame.