In these interactions of heat and electricity a geometry emerges, a fraction.A romance, the stranger and his roommate naked in the lake.Arrival of thunderheads after a long delay.That’s when I begin to say.Architecture, which is an encounter.In all its aspects sexual, the practice of geometry.Yet I took no pleasure in the spring, having been insufficiently punished.This love of beauty, which begins in the senses and travels through them.It requires discipline, flowering of the whip.The hands of a stranger, rubbing slush against my brow.And without such formalities, would we be unable to desire at all.
One acquires an especially lush gender.
Toby Altman
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Copyright © 2025 by Toby Altman.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Toby Altman is the author of Jewel Box (Essay Press, 2025), Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, 2023), and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). He has received fellowships from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Northwestern University and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His scholarly and creative work can be found in Contemporary Literature, English Literary History, Gulf Coast, jacket2, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among other journals and anthologies. He teaches at Michigan State University, where he is Assistant Professor in the Residential College of the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) and Director of the RCAH Center for Poetry.
Rampage Party Press is a small publishing house based in Iowa City, Iowa.
Rampage Party Press publishes an annual magazine, broadsides, zines, and sometimes other things. We are interested in all genres and art forms that can be captured visually, with a special interest in poetry that is aware of the page and texts that use language as material.
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