Author Archives: Claire Bateman

“For such gifts, love (forgiving/their cost, and your digs at performers’ egos, and in hommage/to whatever shakes you wakeful at four a.m./on a May morning to gather a birdsong barrage)/I will bend my bony knees, while I am able,/to the chilly and unforgiving floors of churches/with patience, gaffer tape, and a hundred feet of cable./Wired […]

“Maybe he believed that seeing well/adds being to our brief/reservoir, our breviary./Not that sight is prayer, or memory/faith. Maybe attention is:/a long look at silver maple leaves’ downy/undersides, blue silver like snow-fox,/but duller, animates the downside.”—Mary Barbara Moore Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—1 December 2020—Mary B. Moore’s newest collection, Dear If, is due […]

“It’s a warm December in Washington,/a few days before Christmas, the slaughterhouse/of men quiet, those around the lieutenant general/eager to repeat news of victory they know comes/at a price, even if the war is just and Honest Abe/a liberator. A woman asks, Are you him, really?”—Roy Bentley Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—1 […]

“I’m preaching to myself, he would say, as if the belief that the grace of a common bread was easier for us to comprehend than the oracle of his mouth; that his humanity be acceptable in our sight; that we forgive his inability to live out the words on our behalf. We believers in the […]

“We need a designated verb tense for this indeterminate present. What day is this, we wonder, what month? The one thing we’re not foggy about, however, is the time. You’d think that the presence of sorrow and danger everywhere would have a galvanic effect, but here in 2020, it’s always exhaustion o’clock, as though the […]

“Allergic to their stings, you see my words as bees./For all their softness, you see something hidden./They ask for what you can but will not give: a child,/And hidden in the mildness of my flesh you see the threat . . . .”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—April 2020—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, […]

“Our masters and almost friends,/in lab coats and white Cossack smocks,/floated like ghosts across the hillside,/holding our leashes, staring blindly/at the lens./Sniffing, loafing, eager, and at ease,/everything excited us!”—By Richard St. John Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—February 2020—Richard St. John is the author of Each Perfected Name (Truman State University Press, 2015), The Pure Inconstancy of […]

“Then—/when the once sturdy barrier/is too old; beyond repair—/down to some skeleton/of former fence glory,/the meadowlarks seek new perches/to sing prairie songs/on last autumn’s stakes/of mullein stalks,/yellow breasts glowing like rising suns,/as the shrikes find thorns/to hang limp treasures/of butchered mouse dead.”—By J. Drew Lanham Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—January 2020—Dr. J. Drew Lanham […]

“The world will wrestle you into place and pin you/down while the weeks slip past./Don’t be/so easily corralled. Buck it./Go visit your fucking folk.”— Jacob Boyd Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—December 2019—Jacob Boyd lives in Chicago with his girlfriend, Katie, and their two dogs, Sappho and Sir Isaac Newton. He recently graduated […]

“They play at being retired or married, spend the night in a featherbed four feet off the floor, where/they make love, where she crawls beneath the covers and the bed creaks with no one to hear it./That afternoon, she floated in circles in the pool, music drifting out over the deck./At dusk, the couples arrive. […]