Tidal
Josh Kalscheur
Winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry
Tidal focuses on Chuuk State, a group of islands that are a part of the Federated States of Micronesia. This focus encompasses Micronesia’s morality, its taboos and myths, and how information and stories disseminate between villages, social groups, ethnicities, classes, and genders. Using persona, these poems explore and challenge the idea of witness.
“Voyeurs,” from Tidal:
In the heated banter near Sapuk School my brothers huddled in half-moons around it watching the flat section of the road the flex of hip thrusted the mocked act crowded mutt males working inversesin the body's softest underskin a rattle echoing the wire-grate window the jolt of knee-bends rubbing a burn running through thigh sinew dogs marking a beat down ten-litter teats dragging a fog-dust a rooted chorus a quarter-terrier's thudded weight the speckle-gray half-hound moping the foreground the weaker breeds bleeding from the ears submissive in the dense heat the dogs going for it under the mango tree the thought my brothers must drum in the sporadic head-turns the tightening calves how pain must enter somewhere shift indifferently even the flies flocking to the bloodspot the blurred swarm settling.
