Cory Hutchinson-Reuss
Reading late at night, as we all dissolve into soft fact, wear around the edges till we’re porous, well past the autumnal equinox and entering the season of my failure to care enough, my struggle to muster the energy required for daily maintenance. The moon is jellied and legless, growing a tail. I’m swimming to find ground, I’m digging until I hit water. Well. Vessel. Capsize. Capsule.
No. 1 (medial) (contemporaneous Springs)
Cache of assorted black teas –
N95 mask and chemo infusion IV -
boat cleats – footage of wind
blowing the light around – the earliest
green buds – a lilac wig – paper fragment reading
the days fell into/from my body – cheap cabernet –
one peacock feather – a miniature
drawing in marker: Mama, think about trees –
a package of dried cherries –
The hours occupy a space between two panes of glass, while the intangible part of me resists taxonomy, refusing to hold still —
A small booklight hooks over the yellowing pages, marginalia written in my mid-twenties when I felt a firmament slipping, when my friend was suddenly lost to me except in dreams, where he arrived as a secret, alive but not speaking: some objects [lost? last?] while buried with the dead.
No. 2 (composite) (affinities)
Tear-bottles (lacrymatories), Lamps, Bottles of Liquor; Combes,
Plates like Boxes, brazen nippers to pull away hair, a kinde of Opale
yet maintaining a blewish colour, a great number
of Gemmes with heads of Gods and Goddesses,
an Ape of Agath, a Grasshopper, an Elephant of Ambre,
a Crystall Ball, three glasses, two Spoones, and six Nuts of Crystall,
many hundred Imperial Coyns, three hundred golden Bees,
the bones and horseshoe of his horse.
No. 3 (south)
Built of river. Muddy water,
silt, fish, bottlecaps,
beer cans, water moccasins,
whatever falls from the sky.
Tadpoles, fish eggs,
cattails, rain. Lost
sunglasses. Tree stumps,
stones. Muttered curses. Pleas.
This is a night-cabinet book with drawings of urns, a quincunx, a unicorn.
This is a water book with granular anger and pity, pine sap and the dispersal of clouds over rough surfaces.
No. 4 (romanticism of objects)
One pocket-sized Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,
tattered copies of The Little Prince, The Prophet.
A bracelet of flowers made with pearls and metal.
Jade pendant. Three handwritten letters.
Two rings, one garnet, one opal.
VHS copy of Doctor Zhivago.
“120 Music Masterpieces” on vinyl, with an asterisk
by Massenet’s “Méditation” from Thaїs, and a note saying,
beautiful—one of my favorites.
No. 5 (past oracle)
Testimony for and against the enclosed –
sheet music partially legible –
vials of snow – silver maple remnants
from a storm – records –
scratches – broken set of scales –
this in which
the eye loses itself
— and in death or sometimes before, the vital self scatters, though it has nonetheless been held, possibly it shudders into petals or the overlapping tones of a singing bowl, it settles into a river or field or a vase that once
stored the phrase assorted chrysanthemums like a talisman. The body’s inner work is dispersed among various objects and in this way becomes somewhat perceptible, though all containers fail.
No. 6 ((nested) innermost)
Bones instead of ash.
Blueprints for a city within
a city. Music box paper
strips. Still life with a silver
spring, a fish eye, Dutch
light. Pennsylvania soil
sample. Miniature diorama:
lying on a bier, a figure
covered with two heron
wings, a snakeskin,
more music box strips
curled like scrolls, as if
ready to be eaten,
as if another song
could be made with perforations
from the tiniest awl.
Note: No. 2 is sourced from Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia (Urne-Buriall), 1658.
Cory Hutchinson-Reuss is the author of Triptych, forthcoming from Milk & Cake Press in
2025. A collaborative chapbook of her poems and the visual art of Giselle Simón was published in 2022 as part of the Prompt Press Gallery Series. Originally from Arkansas, she holds a PhD in English from the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City, where she serves as the poetry editor for Brink. Find her at coryhutchinsonreuss.com and on Instagram @atasteforthebitters.