By LUCIAN STAIANO-DANIELS.

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the sea is unaccountable
where i have passed
it will not follow
only the gray waves
the boom of the gray sea

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through roaring night the express
empty
echo
empty

•

boo sheet snapping plastic
halloween on the graves

•

secret archive
priest flirts with the student
rain on rain

•

bijectivity of meaning and seem
behind the curtain the curtain

•

painted shut but one
shoulders against halflight
fighters on his phone

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and went down to the sea in ships the lightcreating air
untarnished

♦

LUCIAN STAIANO-DANIELS is a historian of violent conflict in early-modern Europe and the present, and he is a poet. After his initial education at St. John’s College and NYU, he received a PhD in history from UCLA and is now beginning his career as a professor. His research and teaching interests explore insiders, outsiders, and the despised through the lives of ordinary soldiers from 1500 to the present. Some of his published poems can be found here, his academic publications here, and his discussions of contemporary global affairs here. His first historical book, The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. His poetry is influenced by the stark ungraceful words of the ordinary human beings he studies, and by the classical Japanese poetry of his youth.