The economy of I plungedinto debt while horsemen collectively hunt in freeze-frame for symbols of wealthlike Botticelli’s inflatable shell in a store window. The royal weis not the same as I, seeing myself reflected in empire’s art. I have no feeling about itmy awe elsewhere struck. I feel no belonging to it, apartfrom my gaze belonging to the tradition of indebtedness. Paying for language until I amdead. On the tube, the voice repeats: see it, say it, sorted. Expression says what is seenexposing the vulnerability of I without expectations of closure. I’m trying to hold mysteryin the face of violence.
A Scurry with the Belvoir
James Meetze
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Copyright © 2025 by James Meetze.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
James Meetze [pronounced Metz] is the author of six books of poetry, most recently, The Long Now (White Stag, 2026). Previous books include Dayglo (2011), winner of the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and Phantom Hour (2016), both from Ahsahta Press. He is editor, with Simon Pettet, of Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems by James Schuyler (FSG, 2010). His poetry has been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Finnish, Serbian, and Croatian. He is Professor of Writing and Chair of Honors at the University of Arizona Global Campus and teaches in the Depth Psychology & Creativity Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. For much of the past decade, he has lived on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia and just recently returned to California, settling on the Central Coast.
VOLT was created on an unusually sunny afternoon in San Francisco in 1991. VOLT was originally published by the Pacific Film and Literary Association, a non-profit organization registered in California. VOLT is now housed at Sonoma State University. Innovative in design and content, VOLT publishes a range of adventurous writing. The magazine’s size (9″ by 12″) offers a larger space than usual for an individual poem or piece of prose. Often, work utilizing white space and typography can be found in VOLT.
Founded and edited by poet Gillian Conoley, VOLT appears every spring. Each issue includes cover art, frequently by such artists as Eve Ascheim, Joan Mitchell, Hawley Hussey, Jo Whaley, and Stephen Curry. Contributors have included Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen, Norma Cole, Barbara Guest, Yusef Komunyakaa, Leslie Scalapino, Lisa Fishman, Brian Teare, Andrew Joron, and Charles Simic, among many others. Fiction Editor is novelist Stefan Kiesbye.
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