SPRING/SUMMER 2026
Three Prose Poems
Cory Hutchinson-Reuss
*Please view on desktop for a better reading experience
Zero degrees again. Midwest winters confuse loving with not leaving.
Yes we are made of drifts. Yes we are made of degrees on a map of discontent.
Having never loved winter, it’s where I usually begin, in that white-out season of the invisible, in which one can sit still yet rhythmed into drift and layer, inwardly rocking as if on a dock, swooning as if on a swing at the highest point of its inverted arc, where so many hours I lifted my feet toward oak branches and pretended to be Dorothy, flung into another world by all the coincidences of her dissatisfaction. If I kick my feet how quickly a line will swoop and rush into summer and technicolor, and synchronicity, into the presence, in the present, of another present: the past, so that in the fluorescent aisle of markdowns, the olfactory simulacrum of orange blossom activates an unexpected alignment, calls up a screen of yellow and white honeysuckle rustling, induces tears. Behind the face, a lake forms in the shape of a face. Or in the afternoon, black tea with blue cornflower petals, with red safflower petals. The words, petal and trumpet, the pastel sweetness of honeysuckle, a hint, the hyphen in spring-summer, nested, vined and neural, in a child’s body. Lately I’ve been trying to follow my curiosity without overthinking or explanation, a practice of letting myself become very listening and still, as one does on the nearest edge of a dream, as decades after tilting into the honeysuckle I will lean over the café table and recount the moment to my friend Chris, who says, you saw what you wanted and went directly to it. But this is not that, exactly, not the shortest distance between two points. Imagine an amphitheater of trees, receiving the voice of a child from across the water.
[Arbored breath, breath of absence and alchemy,
Breath of blood history, breath of aromatic bitters]
Note: Georges Poulet, quoted in Living and Dying with Marcel Proust by Christopher Prendergast.
Vacant hills of snow: fugue season, no permits given.
Under each fallow mound I idle and thaw. GOODY’S BODY SHOP: PAINT—REPAIRS—PARTS
In sleep a route takes shape. In every superimposed neighborhood, every vague stretch of dream I walk, a weightless knowledge hovers over me like a cursor, blinking. I’ve come from a long road that runs north and uphill, curves left, intersects with another north-south street, forms a warped ladder with missing rungs. At my back, the street fades in and out and I feel rather than see this flickering. Do you know the sensation of the word eclipse being spoken softly into the crook of your arm. The compression of decades into a split, a second disappearance. Walking down the hill to a honeysuckle hedge wavering, stopping at Melanie’s where tiny frogs hide in crawl spaces under the house. Flying downhill with teenage aunts and uncles on narrow skateboards in orange or yellow, praying for no cars. Other times walking past the Greek Orthodox church into the apartment complex, its pool a cut of aquamarine glinting between trees. Up a slope, on the second floor, with its balcony in the canopy, the apartment where I’m studying for comprehensive exams, sinking for hours into the lightweight almost cardboard couch, surrounded by a sprawl of books and notes, where I and my roommate make omelets after nights out dancing, where the phone with its long spiraling umbilicus rings with news of my friend’s death. This oneiric moment, a now missing rung, a phantom limb, that kind of feeling. At first, I don’t recognize the shape of my walk as a definite pattern, only as a familiar sensation I can’t quite place because it seems to arise from inside me, as if I’ve brought something into being, each time, a loose sense of direction like change jingling in an old man’s pocket. It’s only when I search for my childhood home and zoom out that I discover the contour of my dream walks, the prose poem imprinted in my subconscious, a buried template. I’ve been retracing childhood’s glitchy, holographic parameters. A woozy map of which I make a woozy drawing from memory, trying to externalize these shapes, energetic geometries and flow states, personal geologies. Inner space produces motion as one incipient component of music. Walking operates as a kind of embodied score, a step-breath, a fluid form that can be made cartographic, can be dreamed, can be practiced. How many years did I ghost over myself, forgetting the muscularity of my enjoyment. Traces of its pleasure embed in the words wander, roam, ramble, rove, traipse, meander, cruise, drift, stroll, saunter, flâner, range, gallivant, stray, mill about, tramp, amble. I list. I walk.
The asphalt; the frogs so miniscule they don’t disturb the dirt; the floor of books; the facets of pool. Bachelard writes that sometimes we find ourselves in the presence of a form that guides and encloses our earliest dreams. Bachelard walks according to my inner compass. He whispers traipse, gallivant, saunter into the honeysuckle ear. We amble in the blue glow of proprioception. I’ve been wrong about myself for too long.
[Engine breath and exoskeleton, eiderdown, breath of
Folly, fork in the road, breath of sod]
Ferry across the lake to the island with the cliffs. Let turkey vultures
eat the gift of my violence.
Wheeling below me, undisturbed and ready for any death Until the series of blue
plateaus is limned in pink I sit on the balcony Mount Magazine Lodge, top floor
mid-March bombarded by gusts Yawning roar of the attic fan I used to sleep
under Human voices speak in scraps from the trees below Cedars and
pines slightly wet from prior rains E says the patches of bare trees look like ghosts
or did she say smoke
Wind carries sunlight which seems passive for once less potent
Basking on the precarious edge I’m trying to absorb an immensity before I go
I’m trying to reconcile myself to my leaving When did I love
purely wholeheartedly The place of loss indistinguishable from the point of origin
During one tornado my brother and I slid down the mattress from ceiling into tub
Smell of hair that I once singed on the wall heater Early in life the curtain gently
blowing Now billowing fabrics in a scene without sound fill me with afternoon light,
scalp tingling The collaboration of wind and sun being my favorite flickering
especially near water Malleable screen Properties seem transferrable Places
layer Ernaux calls time palimpsestic Alveoli fill with air I stood motionless in a
vernal lung The trees were coming in the sun was coming in on the breeze
A billowing a cloud formation Earliest red periphery Flash at the window,
blur of leaves Motion transfers to the branches whose slender sentences shudder
and bob The room contains the diffuse chronology of naptime, its quiet wakefulness
One little barefoot nucleus In orbit, a closet of dresses A bed bridging dark air
and recurrent dreams Dollhouse A small table Window Window
Goldenrod curtains held back with butterfly clothespins
What hinges upon the presumed bird unseen in its wholeness upon this moment’s
kinetic residue Later the color’s religious connotations its Caravaggio intensity
and mesmerism a draping cloak or blood on the cobblestones its carnelian
spill and pool its uterine heaviness
Epicenter of color shimmering motion and parasympathetic activation from which
forms a cool pillow for the future I’m of this imprint A head on the feather pillow
with hair splayed like a fraying scrim Color follows me through time
Threads, tendons, raw-meat-vulture-heads Auburn locks fall into the sink
From the edge of the bed I stare at the cardinal who receives my shaking I want
to be luminous like the Caravaggio I visit in Kansas City during chemo luminous
in my limited suffering like the dark edges of the paintings also glow and have movement
You can see that they have secret life and are not just background Like so the
rooms in me atomize then coalesce into a suggestion The faint sound of someone flipping
through a book and the small breath it exudes near your cheek Lightest touches of air
Anthology in a low voice Paper fan This mode of being in the world
Fog surrounds the mountain the next morning thick and blue-gray Dissipates as I
drive down, slowly as possible E draws in her notebook Pines and winding
highways move in and out of grayscale and wet color An experimental faith The
limits of one’s control Of belief The choice of practices
that might break and re-form sentences I read I heard I recited I wrote I swallowed I
imposed to split myself from my trust to divide mirror from shadow
What mode is truly religious Might re-tie the confused mind to its bare feet
in the grass its face in the boat’s blue wind might remember the child as a
condensed vulnerability might hold the intense ambivalence of jeremiad and
panegyric might break, blow, burn through the metrics
of purity and protection, of ready-made A kind of debridement to offer my
disempowerment, my anger, my goodness, my armor, my contempt, my metallic skins
as the carrion they are Yes tenderness is the great beauty a horizontal
flow between imperfect lives, between branches and leaves between me and my home
state hydrangea cloud and bee A slow glory, and muddy How do I move
this knowledge into my body I keep returning to this place unquenched
and repetitive whether fire thirst both To stand in front of mimosa
flowers and magnolias can feel imperative To root and sway in my own shadow
not by reason but by other powers This is never over
At Hawksbill Crag huge sculptural boulders balance on a cliff’s edge framed by a
foreground of yellow leaves fluttering solidity and precarity A familiar arrangement
The land’s counterweights and distances the chill the gray weather
It will burn off into the hot cocoon I remember backlit clouds forming in my hair I’m
swinging so high in years The ground drops and rises From the ridgeline I
can see my daughter on the outcropping Beneath her the ground falls away into the
future and past They’re the mountain’s dreams in the present Mountain
hewn and mossy Assemblage of rock and water Her frayed toboggan her olive
jacket that looks like mine I was swinging scooping low near the roots No one
remains unwounded forever The ground drops into shadow
then rises as crumbling birds My loss and origin the changeable panorama I led her
by my younger hand to this path then this vista its plunge of evergreens
and pewter sky Her cheeks alive with chilled air and pink departure The mountain
dreams the past and future from which I’ve returned Take our inner measure
our intimate scope our thieves’ diameter I’m here as her memory inside
the mountain’s dream
[Undertow breath, caliper breath, breath of sieve and cleaver,
Velvet breath, breath of grease, breath of fire]
Note: Italicized portions quote from Annie Ernaux, The Years, translated by Alison L. Strayer; Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier; John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.”