Sunday Service: Sean Edgley Poem
Réka’s Dream
She dreamt that I was living
in the basement of a cathedral.
To visit me
she had to climb through a window
and then through an air duct
with Rabelais’ catacomb bones.
The church was actually
a monastery in the Tatra mountains
where the monks made
ale and goat cheese.
No, that’s not right.
I was being held
against my will
in the basement
of a megachurch in France
and I was getting
the Hansel & Gretel treatment.
One day during her crawl
she overheard
the women in the laundry room.
They speaking in English badly.
They cackled in French.
They were anti-Semitic in Hungarian.
They got tricky and discussed my fate
within the cult in Slovak.
She saw one hooded auntie open
the washing machine door
but what the woman dragged out
was not laundry.
Angelology is the study of angels
she said, lowering herself
into my cell.
But those women are not angels.
Sean Edgley is a native of the San Francisco area currently getting his MFA at City College of New York. He has spent several years working and traveling in Europe and Asia, and these experiences inform much of his writing. This spring he has poems appearing in Literary Bohemian, Lyre Lyre, and Promethean. He is currently working on translations of contemporary Korean poetry, as well as a futurist screenplay set in China, inspired by Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading.
Sunday Service: Gregory Sherl Poem
Pre-Genesis
These are my words. Press them against your gums.
In the beginning God Sr. made God Jr.
because everyone needs to come
from somewhere.
That means God Sr. just appeared
& that wouldn’t make any sense.
Know this book doesn’t make any sense,
but neither did the first one.
Still, follow me.
Tucking God Jr. into bed, God Sr. tells him
I hope you dream about stupid zombies
instead of martyrs being eaten by lions.
God Jr. is scared of lions because thoughts
of the future are worse than thoughts of the past
when the past is just beginning, like fourteen
lines ago beginning. READ MORE >
Sunday Service: Tim Earley Poem
from The American Folkways Series
Spring placed its finger on my spine. I am not some kind of zombie with a surfboard and ham. I am not some kind of pigeon cooing itself to death. The engine of my flatbed truck cuggles on the hill. The neighborhood wyvern sits alilt on the berm of its own brain. I am ready to have some babies. I am ready to be a bellicose producer and have some babies and toss them into the air for years until the Lord strikes them with the gift of speech and their tales turn the mountain’s insides out into the meat I eat for breakfast. Until then I will watch my squash grow and pine for the cleft of some long lost beauty’s historical chin. The daily path is riddled with deceits, dresses, yellow hems. We were merry once. We hung curtains. The Lord brought us together in a shallow pool, the water beaded on her fur. I loved and despised both her vicious and enduring parts. She could not get on with my mother and left for the insolvent side of Jacksonville, Florida. The blue mouth killed my mother. Her head-wrap. Her incessant dusting. The hymnal contained eternal springs and she sang over it, her thick ankles and periwinkle eyes. The spard-misted clouds of March reached inside us. Walking to the church was terrifying. Walking into the church felt like walking into your own mouth. Inside the church Jesus was hairy with milk, laments, and there was a copperhead swimming in the baptismal. The blue mouth killed her. Do not put your mouth on the spigot, dear Lord, do not insert into your mouth a hickory twig, Sweet Peter James. I suspect my children will not exist or else become legendary in their silences, mute puttocks scrimmed from the sourmash. And yet the mountain rain, all kinds of spectacular dying, Biblical black leather, going to town, hair that won’t stop growing, a mosquito stealthing blood, the asylum inmates buried vertically. I shall play my toothpick. I shall eat yonder cabin. I shall ride yonder donkey. I shall ho yander cake. I shall be wrought from my own particular orality. I shall wear the yellow dress in private. I shall smoke my mother. I am not some kind of zombie with a surfboard and ham. I piss upon your digital age and your perfumes rent from dog eggs. I am wrenched into this mountain. It is airish out. Aroint my crotch with your killing gun. Scoop out my scrotum like a pumpkin’s entrails. Remove my potato eye and shove into its gulch the caché-bearing fury of your Quaker cock. Break my spine, silver rain, a bait of ruined teeth and quick-feckled lies. She remains in Jacksonville, still, and in my dreams tiny dobros hang from her firm and too large ears. My warped singing shovel hangs in the barn. I have never heard a more vatic rooster. Some bright morning. A song more dead. That dazzle. Oh, Twila.
Tim Earley is the author of two collections of poems, Boondoggle (Main Street Rag, 2005) and The Spooking of Mavens (Cracked Slab Books, 2010). His poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, Conduit, Typo, Hotel Amerika and other journals. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
Sunday Zen
It is Sunday.
The water in the river is cold.
Here are some images from and words about the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum:
Every surface has a face
if we explore a surface
as a human.
Here we can see a shape
like a hallway.
Sunday Service: Sarah Rose Nordgren poem
Unfolded
All the world’s details blur when I turn
the fan on to sleep. The little cattle
fall over on the table. The sheep wobble.
Furniture skids across the floor
like crumpled receipts. The house,
an origami box, is undone.
Confetti falls out. Flimsy, after all,
like mother said, it wasn’t expected to last.
I have no husband, no child,
no dog to feed: the faces
I put so much faith in are paper circles.
Templates of Christ, they
resemble him in the most obvious ways:
mute and tiny and light. But He is
invisible. Unfolded. Taking
His beatings with gratitude and grace.
Sarah Rose Nordgren’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Pleiades, The Literary Review, Quarterly West, Cincinnati Review, Verse Daily, and the Best New Poets 2011 anthology. She is the recipient of two poetry fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she is currently in residence, and a Louis Untermeyer Tuition Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She grew up in Durham, North Carolina.
Sunday Service: Scott Hammer Poem
from SAVE
The player piano was haunted.
No one knew
the difference between
it and its twin
in Sioux City,
which had no spirit.
Saloons these days still reek
of hollowed peanut
shells.
Still cover puke with sawdust.
They play La Paloma of
Her Own Volition.
The machine rolls, the
keys get depressed.
Just like that, some drunk
in the corner
starts singing.
Scott Hammer is the author of the poetry chapbook Mock Draw. His writing has appeared in La Petite Zine, Noo Weekly, Lungfull!, Poet Lore, Press 1, Inertia Magazine, and Hamilton Stone Review. He is currently writing and living in Philadelphia, and can be followed on Tumblr.
Sunday Service: Kathryn Mockler poem
Bookstore
The bookstore was on top of another store
at the corner of a busy street. I walked up the stairs
and was met by God, a middle-aged woman
with blonde hair and glasses. God told me to take
my time looking around her father’s store. The
store had not been in operation for several years.
Who’s God’s father? I wondered. No one ever
talked about him. It was once a fine store that sold
rare and out-of-print books, she said. It now sat
dusty, and soon the building would be sold. A
lot of organization is needed, I said. She agreed.
I picked up a white and brown plastic clip-on
earring off the floor and put it on. It looked like
the kind of earring my mother kept in her jewelry
boxes, so I made a mental note to find the other
one straight away. But something drew me to the
back of the store, even though I didn’t want God
to think I planned to steal the earring, which
must have been worth a lot of money. I walked
past bookshelves, which were in varying stages of
disarray and stopped at a corner shelf near the back
exit. There I found a navy blue ledger. When I
opened the ledger I saw a list and then I saw my
name and signature and the date—January 11,
1993. That’s me, I said to God who was now standing
beside me. Yes, she said, I knew you’d come back
for it. And then she walked to the front, leaving me
alone to figure out exactly what I had come for.
Kathryn Mockler is the author of the poetry book Onion Man (Tightrope, 2011). Her writing has been published most recently in Rattle, Joyland, and CellStories. Her short films have been broadcast on TMN, Movieola, and Bravo and have screened at festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival, Palm Springs International Festival, and EMAF. Currently, she teaches creative writing at the University of Western Ontario and is the co-editor of the UWO online journal The Rusty Toque.
Sunday Service: Mike Lala Poem
Mt. Rushmore Poem
Six thousand pounds of dynamite
for the father of my country.
A chisel for God’s messenger, detained.
A hammer as his cue:
Washington: Bring the money.
Jefferson: It’s soft.
Borglum: Move behind Washington, and Roosevelt, back.
South Dakota: It’s odd here.
Italy: It’s old.
Michelangelo: That’s freedom: a new face in an old place.
Han Solo: I know.
I stood at the rail, put a quarter in, and received my 90 seconds
set aside for detail:
Theodore, sweating,
Tom staring off at the hills.
Abraham, in absentia,
George, chest out.
Susan B. Anthony (at home): All rise for the Federal Boys Club.
Roosevelt (to tourist): Take the fucking photo.
Jefferson (erected): Leave your likeness where they worship.
The stationary viewer clicked closed, and mother
led me to Crazy Horse in-progress. I looked at the mountain,
the face emerging from it, then the plaster mockup
on the boardwalk by the gift shop.
Ziolkowski (on his death bed): Do it slow. Do it right.
He has been honored by the U.S. Postal Service
with a 13-cent stamp.
Michael Lala grew up mostly in the western United States and Tokyo, and studied writing in Michigan. He is the author of the chapbooks [fire!] ([sic] Detroit, 2011) and Under the Westward Night (forthcoming, Knickerbocker Circus New York, 2011), and he curates Fireside Follies, lives, and works in Brooklyn. mikelala.com.
Sunday Service: Allyson Paty & Danniel Schoonebeek Poems
TORCH SONG: HOLY DAY
Our woman of black knees
in the dirt she is singing
sweetheart spit your teeth
into my hand and for you
I will play the finest rattle
•
The gossip about god was
he’s a woman drinks rotgut
no camisole sees the veins
in his husband’s eyelids says
hallelujah this is all my fault
TORCH SONG: SLUMGULLION
We come from low country we say
when thunderheads growl that’s god
talking to himself when lightning
strikes your mother down in a field
that’s god saying I’ve got a question
•
The furrow belongs to the crows now
no last stalk no cornhusk doll to march
through town and hang from the door
of the landlord who says shut her out
should the wheat ghost come to yours
TORCH SONG: CHANTEUSE
Hair teased out like a flame
an old standard (for the crowd)
got a feeling cause I’m blue oh
lord it disgusts me heartache
all this spectacle and prayer
•
There are nights I suspect
I will find you your fingers
sear at the tips a music box
in your hands your refrain
will no one turn this crank
Torch Songs is a collaboration between poets Allyson Paty and Danniel Schoonebeek. Colliding the form of the torch song in American music with the aubaudes of ancient Japanese female poets, each torch song is formed by joining together two five-line poems that the poets write in response to each other.
Allyson Paty is from New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, The Awl, DIAGRAM, Boxcar Review, and elsewhere.
Danniel Schoonebeek’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, The Rumpus, Tin House, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere.
Sunday Service: Michael Robbins Poem
Money Bin
I got a tattoo of God. You can’t see it
but it’s everywhere. If I seem out of it,
do the math. I was put on earth.
And then you were, making up your feet
as you went along. New thinspo clanks the spank
bank. New emoticon makes a Holocene.
If you want to get in shape you have to jog
your memory of Euclid. Jesus built
a ship in a ship shape and said
there’s plenty of loaves in the sea.
Some Idaho you turned out to be.
Some money bin I, a rich duck, swim in!
The coins of you in my feathers like water
off my back. I count each red cent of you.
Now the rain with its funny money din.
The rain beats a tattoo of God any day.
Michael Robbins’s first book of poems, Alien vs. Predator, will be published by Penguin in April 2012. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, Boston Review, Fence, and elsewhere. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Sunday Service: Erev Hallows Eve
The Olden Days
Spirits make THE THUMP.
Have you ever felt THE SHAKE.
Walking backwards on the Bridge of Names.
Even when I was not holding your hand.
Spooky boys laughing in the lake.
Have you ever been to the VERY BOTTOM?
Bad things happening in those woods.
I was not holding YOUR hand.
The dead face kills me again.
I am on the kitchen floor.
You are on the back road.
WAIT.
Where were we.
Running backwards on the shaking Bridge of Names.
–Lauren Ireland
What It Feels Like For a Girl
We are poco a poco, becoming witchy on a need-to-know basis. Our elders foist their little bottles of enzymes on us. Life experience naturopathy. In their presence, we do strange things: drink ginger and vinegar lemonade, lie down on the floor for past life regression. A few drops of oregano oil in a shot glass filled with water and, as with a dab of wasabi, come clear sinuses. Left alone again we find it’s a little too quiet and we forget the difference between good and bad bacteria. We get scared. Intend to meditate and stretch, to host a dinner party sometime soon.
–Krystal Languell
Lauren Ireland grew up in southern Maryland and coastal Virginia. She is the author of two chapbooks: Sorry It’s So Small, from Factory Hollow Press, and Olga & Fritz, from Mondo Bummer Press. She lives on Alabama Street in San Francisco.
Krystal Languell was a semi-finalist for the 2010 University of Akron Press Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2011 National Poetry Series. Her first book, Call the Catastrophists, has just been published by BlazeVox Books.
Sunday Service: Austin LaGrone Poem
When the Victim has Collapsed & Cannot be Lifted
The matchstick lady dances in a bowl of fire.
“Fire” –So very American, writes Larry Levis.
Casual and therefore exalted over angels, writes
Hermes Trismegistus. I’ve been thinking
about Tabitha. Her baby seals and black
pepper. The way she jimmies the diaspora
of the least fetching bishop and huddles
coldly in the back pocket of the Oldsmobile.
I want to poke her with a cheap umbrella
beneath a mutual communion of stars.
Yep, you’ve seen it coming for a long time,
the crescendo arrives like a blue rhinoceros,
horn aflame. And death, death wears a nice tie,
picks up the check, combs over a few greasy
strands of hair like a man with many watches.
Austin LaGrone is the author of Oyster Perpetual (Lost Horse Press, 2011). He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at John Jay College.
Sunday Service: Leanna Petronella Poem
Promises, Promises
Let’s only bless each other
Said the mad priest to his cross
The cross chuckled
And jumped to the ground
The priest watched it hop away
The priest sighed
And drearily married his left foot
To his right
And we must never be honest with each other
Vowed a man to his wife
She took away her veil
And planted flowers in her moles as he stared
It is for the best, she agreed
Applying warts to his teeth
What can we do
I asked my body
We can twist your skull
Into star metal
But besides that
I want to sing all the songs
The man said to his coffin
The coffin opened and closed
And offered a steady beat
Leanna Petronella is a Michener Fellow in the University of Texas’s MFA program. Her poetry has appeared in Cutbank, La Petite Zine, and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review.
TODAY AREA
I don’t get the HTMLGIANT internal memos but I feel like Mike Young told me that people (you people?) don’t like when people (what people?) write about events, especially events in New York, so I won’t say anything about the launch of Nothing tonight at BookCourt at 7. Also I forget to read HTMLGIANT but it looks like no one’s said anything about how one can already get Nothing in the mail? Nothing is not a nail?
Anyway, if you are ANYWHERE near Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, you should be THERE THERE, at Book Zoo, where Amanda Nadelberg and Mark Leidner are reading TONIGHT at 7 pm.
The first time I saw Amanda Nadelberg read it was in a movie theatre and was one of the best readings I have ever seen / heard. The first time I heard Mark Leidner read he read with Shannon Burns of Lousville and it was one of the best readings I have ever heard / seen.
The second time I heard Amanda Nadelberg read was the first time I saw my brother perform a Comedy Act Not To Laugh At and again Amanda Nadelberg brought the house down. The second time I heard Mark Leidner, my brother did another Comedy Act Not To Laugh At and Mark Leidner did standup and everyone laughed.
My brother first performed his third Comedy Act Not To Laugh At opening for Mark Leidner (and Shannon Burns and Ben Hersey) at the launch for Leidner’s Beauty Was The Case That They Gave Me at Flying Object. Tonight he’s performing said Comedy Act in Louisville opening for Bonnie Prince Billy.
Point is, if you don’t go see Amanda Nadelberg & Mark Leidner tonight, you’re missing out. I’m missing out. So: if, in the comments, you leave the best scoop on any of today’s events, I’ll send you a copy of Shannon Burns’ Preserving the Old Way of Life (Factory Hollow Press) and Ben Hersey’s This Is What We’re Up Against (The Chuckwagon), a book beloved by Blake Butler, author of nothing. (What’s a scoop? Read Shannon Burns’ “What’s the Scoop?” after the jump.)
Amanda Nadelberg is the author of Isa the Truck Named Isadore (Slope Editions), Building Castles in Spain, Getting Married (The Song Cave), and, forthcoming from Coffee House Press this April, Bright Brave Phenomena.
Mark Leidner is the author of three chapbook cities, The Night of 1000 Murders (Factory Hollow Press), Willie (minutes BOOKS), Romantic Comedies (The Chuckwagon), and the book of aphorisms, The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover (Sator Press). His first book of poetry, Beauty Was The Case That They Gave Me is just out from Factory Hollow Press. READ MORE >
Sunday Service: Anthony Madrid Poem
GIRLS WHO ARE UNFAITHFUL AND AT THE SAME TIME RELENTLESSLY HONEST
Girls who are unfaithful and at the same time relentlessly honest
Are not operating in accord with the Darker-Than-Any-Mystery.
Only she who is relentlessly faithful and meanwhile full of lies
Can be said to be in accord with the Darker-Than-Any-Mystery.
The madness of love takes many forms. In me, it’s the illusion
I am Abul-Majd Majdud ibn Adam Sanai Ghaznavi.
Hé wanted the whole universe to be an unconjugated verb.
I won’t say which, I’ll let you guess. Ha!—right on the first try.
Yet, to me, “love” is not even a noun; it’s merely a case inflection.
Any name in the D-L triple-X can be inflected for Ishq-e-Majazi.
So, don’t say “God is great.” Say “God is glamour”—it’s what you mean.
The Almighty bottoms the bhakti. God is the ultimate top. And that’s why
The Tibetan Fuckmaster King says if a halt were put to all coupling,
The human race would end, not after a generation, but that very instant.
And if I am impenetrable in this and my other verses,
It is only because you can’t penetrate | a wall that is not there.
I am the poet Mardud; I had no childhood. Whoever wants
To get at my meaning will have to turn her back on her childhood.
Anthony Madrid lives in Chicago. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI Online, Boston Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Poetry, and WEB CONJUNCTIONS. His first book, called THE 580 STROPHES, will be published by Canarium Books, spring 2012.
Sunday Service: Stephanie Ford Poem
Regional Transportation District
On the bus I saw the scientists. They were re-enchanting
the commute. Atom after atom exploded for them;
every instant they looked at—a kiss, a tattoo—
bloomed, and I learned to hate my kaleidoscope
for making such cold work of beauty. Things change!
At the back of the bus, professor-poets schmoozed Western buddhists
and their backstage passes dazzled us all.
A child, I wanted the buddhists’ marigold minds
and t-shirts, but the scientists wore mild beards of wonderment
and every rider turned a blind eye
to the small-time pushers, the new money planting our medians,
the government building’s blacked-out windows,
and the small way my friend with the yellow braids
vanished. Every loss is a chrysalis, said the oldest poet
through his four-part beard, a living mandala on the 204.
Beard like a river, a tantrum, a tendrilled florescence,
and I pulled the bell-string, exercised my small power. In memoriam
I fixed a dead-grass soup, a weedy tea—scent of paste,
of making. Now the driver wears high-end headphones
and I see the signs for peace and anarchy
switchbladed into safety glass, the scientists
taking pills in precise measurements, pale tongues of gum
stabbed by poets’ pencil tips. The buddhists gone bald
and gossiping in the back, everyone reciting
an abracadabra: Prayer wheels. Power plants. Bluebells. Bus tokens.
Stephanie Ford is from Boulder, Colorado, and now lives in Los Angeles. Her poems have appeared most recently in Tin House, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere.
Sunday Service: Joe Aguilar Poems
The Tiny Crown of Life
I lay in bed without makeup.
I lay my cheek on bible leather.
TV shows are waking life.
Commercials are dreams.
I steal Mom’s necklace.
We trip on down the road.
Hands on Dad.
I suffer the tiny crown of life.
I suffer my ponytail.
A locket keeps a small gas star.
Light moves all over my Jordans.
By the sea we all hug.
By the sea a hand sifts through mine.
Jellyfish boil in the spume.
My hair whips out.
We saw away my ponytail.
Captivity #1
How our temple brightens these young hills. We of Saxon strain. We of the Lord. We learn of heathens only when gunfire clatters the house. Out our window homes are burning in the snow. Our neighbor runs into the woods grabbing his organs in. The snow is loud with fire. They are so many strong even our dogs do not rise up. Still I wait on the Lord’s will in the kitchen with my child and my knife. Still the heathens shoot through the glass through my arm. I get dark with hate and pain. They come to us. They walk us gory through the rocks and ice. They walk most of us dead. They leave us in drifts where we drop. Still the angels feel thick around us in the half-light. My child fouls herself astride the pinto. She growls at me. The smell of us. Still I trust the Lord might set His hand to heal my wound. What they call their village but a strew of twigs. What they call their homes but errata. The swollen hole in me that leaches white. They guard us in a muddy hut. Still our nights and days full of the peace of the Lord. Overnight my child expires in the filth without a noise. Still the Lord says not to weep but keep an eye to His relief. Still the Lord says justice is mine. The pale horse. They wrap my bluing arm in oaken leaves. They grouse around their fire. They smoke a weed. I watch the hills for English steeds. I want their heads to break. I want the snow to dark. I want the Lord.
Joe Aguilar lives in Missouri. His work is in Puerto del Sol, LIT, Caketrain and elsewhere.
Sunday Service: Molly Brodak Poem
Hex
Gorges ago
in gymnasium-Church
under puff
of sleeve
in acid orange/
lavender/brown
& weak yellow
I felt punched
& sensed a new hollow
where a verse wormed:
He will spit you out
& the candy-bunny hollow
now punched
with He will spit you out
held hollows upon
hollows, cellless organs
& blank synapse billows
of He is not coming here
I am spit out after gorges of
gorges of minutes having
soft-snapped my tooth off
& held it all service
all heartless singing
all heartless repeating
held it under my tongue
finally spit from His mouth
the glassy hollow charm
& now feeling handless
& calm in gymnasium-Church
that one time only.
Molly Brodak is the author of A Little Middle of the Night (U of Iowa Press, 2010) and is the 2011-2013 Poetry Fellow at Emory University.
September 11, 2011
In 1953, Rene Magritte painted a large group of intricately organized near-identical men suspended in the air, their somewhat weary context solely established next to a building, named “Golconda” after the ruined Indian capital of the ancient Kingdom of Golkonda (c. 1364–1512). The city was built by a Hindu king, and later conquered by an Islamic kingdom. Religion is the impossible imperative of possibility. When Donald Rumsfeld said “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” he was referring to absent weapons of mass destruction, though I consider such invocation an invitation to God, or at least the idea. Buddhism’s genocide smear record is less red than Islam and Christianity, but it’s so very easy to close your eyes and meditate and to want nothing. Buy a bath robe at Target and you’re almost home. “I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for his reputation if he didn’t,” goes Jules Renard, and I imagine Oscar Wilde or Woody Allen moving such lips. The eloquent writer, myself included on a good day, may well be an asshole. In 2001, exactly 10 years ago this restful Sunday, an unknown man, among many other fallen (literally) ones, was captured by someone’s camera lens in his growth towards his concrete demise, a descent man no doubt. The image is more striking than others: the passive restraint of his limbs; the vertical backdrop cast by the edifice from which he had recently departed; the stately gravity of a non-angel. He does not flail nor mime an impossible flight with the skeletal wings of a human arm. Tilt the image 90° clock-wise and he seems to be resting comfortably on a mattress, some mild nightmare about being forced to jump out of his office window the next hypothetical morning, a Tuesday ’twas. Surrealism purports non-rational significance, meaning a bunch of people can’t just hang out gracefully in the air. They must, as grand spiritual vectors, ascend or descend. Falling is not falling, but a small object’s migration towards a larger object. Newton killed God, Einstein killed Newton, and Nietzsche tried to catch up. An object falling freely towards the earth’s surface increases in velocity by 9.81 m/s (22 mph) for each second of its descent. In a vacuum, of course. Ignoring air resistance, those subtle wisps of buoyancy felt in one’s shirt, as hands of angels or ghosts.
