Marc Vincenz
Marc Vincenz is a poet, translator, editor, fiction writer, musician and artist. He has published over 40 books of fiction, poetry and translation. His recent books are The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars, The Mayfly Codex, Rocketship to the Andromeda Galaxy, and Three Telltale Love Signs. Forthcoming poetry collections are Ironclad (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), Spells for the Wicked (Unlikely Books, 2025), and No More Animal Poems (White Pine, 2026). Forthcoming translations are Still Some Light in the House and Selected Prose Poems, both by Klaus Merz, and Country of Small Men by Ernst Halter, all translated from the German. Marc is also editor-publisher of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing.
Soon the rivers will be
running with dead fish again.
Down at your feet,
a bumblebee struggles to keep aloft;
How the trickle of pity unfolds, how the decadence of liturgy is a bitter taste of blood; or, fishing deep, the vermin streaks and you at the threshold, all those sweeping features, all the rocks that climb out of the sea, all the thieves clinging to the peaks.
hallucination invented metaphysics,
separating out the divine. Now,
remove everything added
in the process of knowing.
Tell us though
of unquestioning apartheid,
of segregation,
of that being-according-to-what-you-are-not
and of how-you-may-be-defined,