Introduction: Steve Gehrke

In the marrowless dialects, trying to find a crescendo of moth wings, I imagined my wife, botanical and numbed. My body a box of piano strings, of bird, no center, no storm eye, of his soft tissues through the trees, I've been trying to make a song from the body's gaps. Like poison in a snake's gum, Steve Gehrke's poems ink and conceal, occupy only the backyard syntax, sing to feel the violence. As I inhale him, he writes, from the noose of elegy, she was both alive and dead in me. At the dirty clenched Pacific, whatever self was left was lost in the acoustics of the frontal lobe: past/future him. St. Paul said, because of sin, the soul scars and cholesterols, undying cell-by-cell. He wrote his executioners to entice the wild beasts, the language like the body no false god of formula. The soil had made the fucking branches the body's lock, the priest's hands, corseted, amnesiac. These God-sphinxed walking texts, God-less, corpsed with the creatures whorled into the stone. Having entered the mind, Steve Gehrke's poems quicken the soil of us, the harbor frozen, electricity and feathers, that vertigo, that swift. Like a lamp of a fragile ark on which our chromosomes suck a vision through, Eugene O'Neill, St. Ignatius dive back into himself. Bowered world, words that try to father, can’t you feel the music burning? Steve Gehrke.