Lindsay Hill was born in San Francisco and graduated from Bard College. Since 1974, he has published six books of poetry including Contango, and The Empty Quarter (both from Singing Horse Press). Sea of Hooks, his first novel, was published by McPherson & Company in late 2013 and won the 2014 PEN Center USA Fiction Award and the 2015 IPPY Gold Medal for Literary Fiction. Lindsay works in the nonprofit sector and lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, the painter Nita Hill.

     If a place explains itself in a sack of shards if a place where feet struck locks
     In the ground with their heals accelerates from an edge on a bed of wheels and loss
     Where disarticulated conveyances scatter their marriage of severed hands and gears
     Across an actinide field of mirror-works and pasts in-folded into mileage and exhaust

                                                                                                                    from Socket

Chris Ashby is a poet and essayist. He is also the editor and publisher of Couch Press, which can be found at http://couchpress.tumblr.com. He frequently collaborates with Nate Orton on his My DAY series exploring place-based poetics in the Northwest. His most recent chapbook is Salt Lover I-V (c_L Books). Chris lives in Portland, OR and works in the forests and grasslands of the West.

Ah, Helium, invisible yet able to hold up ships
we perceive
every object in its own time
in which the object watches the blue cover pass

there is an unbreakable limit for all life
we call this death
in the cosmos we call this light
we make the calls

Helium is the light of the sun
and its time is an aesthetic phenomenon
coupled with the rising yellow glow of the retribution
the post human
and the cyborg

poetics is the final fantasy of contradictory entities

what would a global phenomenon feel like?
it would feel like living
like the season we’re not having

Helium is the element of the fall
tucked away under the rocks
mixed with industrial leak detection