Hunter Larson was selected as the winner of the Fifth Annual Brannan Prize by Judge Vi Khi Nao. On Larson’s works, Nao writes: “The poet is visibly lucid and fearless and precise. Long and generally skinny, this poet’s peripatetic lines, filled with sageful tenderness, never cease moving, transitioning, reflecting, glancing, submerging. The poet’s deliberate wisdom travels like a hypodermic needle, piercing through empirical senses and diaphanous acuity with a lucent, meditative, surprising logic that is simultaneously blinding and eye opening. These three hypnotic poems exude a softness so psychically argute—they could cut metal without hydro.”
These Days
I love it when
it rains now
it feels like noon
or the idea of noon
is something
proportional to
what I imagine
it feels like to
put the flower of
a memory up
to the cold surface
of the present
shake the doom
back out, this
question of what
it means to be
closer to an answer
what does it mean
to feel yourself
lifted up
by a glance
on the street
losing balance
when I die
I’ll close my eyes
and imagine a desert
yeah, a soft pillar
of light to throw
my mind against
it’s not disaster
it’s desire
stupid tension
and everyone done
with something
everyone loves
someone else, touch
is the hum
that shaves away
this morning’s
golden shoulder
splitting in time
to render the social
in the obvious
light, to get away
with being honest
is the function
of my perfect
presence here
this scaffold we
hang the night on
I open my head
and this is mercy
and this is actually
physically felt
on all sides as if
the day were
converging now
pouring light
a perfect thread
to lose myself
in everything
I’ve ever done
to lose myself in
everything I’ve got
to do tomorrow
I cup my mind
around you
hang a little bell
in the afterglow
the quiet fade
when sleep breaks
it’s impossible
to see through
when you’re
so locked into it
a moment reversed
spilling sunlight
and reciprocity
I love this
urgency, it makes
me feel vulnerable
to be closer
to you, this vague
intersection of
disparate feelings
I feel brilliant
I feel like dropping
everything, tonight
I’ll leave
the window open
and let all that
good air back in
tonight I’ll watch
everything drain
back through
the people we
wanted to be
when the night
was like rain
the night was like
it’s supposed to be
and I keep thinking
maybe maybe
tenderness isn’t
the word for it
more like magic
sky so magnetic
I could break
an hour against it
I’m just saying
it feels real
enough to touch
I’m just saying
it feels like winning
when I’m with you
it feels like rain
a lack that
absorbs the night
like a star, this total
realization that
everything resets
in the silent portal
of a gesture
spit back out
it’s not objective
something fresh
for everyone
a stream of light
rinsing the brick
building I see
every day, I walk
adjacent to this
feeling I just
want to do good
work, I don’t know
I just want to
say something
real for once, like
the night was like
rain the night was
like rain and I love
it, I really do, I
just needed to say
it to you, knowing
you and all of me
aimed directly
at the sun
this world couldn’t keep us
if I could just reduce
this feeling, but it’s not
definitive, it’s
functionless and vague
feeling this again
if I could just
blend us back into it
soft water, a clip
of reason
my mild ambition
when I step
through the soft
fringe of the day
everything I touch
falls away with you
sitting on the rug
and me outside of it
time’s distorted
flare, dark and running
I thought I could live
inside that feeling
retroactively
could be a new person
when I’m walking
at the edge of a season
I see a building
people inside it
stacking language
against the night
tilting in the definitive
and for what
my stylized concern
listless and yearning
in the glazed
morning with a pin
of light just holding
in the space
between each new
thought forming
an event gone static
in the long
hallway of my memory
I’m not immune
no one has power
the day is a silo
filled with bad money
but it’s so cosmetic
my concern
and the shit I do
daily just to get through
another night spent
reeling in the plain
colors of what
tomorrow is a circle
and today I’m nominal
isolated and fragmenting
in a narrative
sense partially
obscured by the opacity
of the plot, but I lost it
seven years ago
I threw myself
into the river and dragged
my face across a stretch
of intention
this love is leveling
thick petals
of form just falling
everywhere I look
replicating a distance
replete with
heavy shadow
on the pond the light
travels from rock to rock
and the sky locks
back into the day
we go so awkwardly
through the thin
film that separates
our living
from the totalizing
echo of what we had
the stunning violet
your face, this light
new song, total
volition, this world
couldn’t keep
us, this world couldn’t
keep us from what
we needed from each
other now it’s summer
and the new grass
is a phrase lit up
by the sky’s impossible
I think the final image
back into limitless
heat and protection, what
I needed from you
and what you needed
from me, the final image
in an overcast sky
is of the soft wreckage
of a life spent agonizing
in the subtlety
of connection, reversing
the dominant hand
breaks into gesture
while the throat
releases the body
from ordinary longing
these are the things
we’ll remember
when we step back
from the body, when we
come back to the body
into the absence that’s you tonight
there I go again coldly wanting
a past so removed it’s compact
so I broke it open so I wanted more
from the dying you said, it felt
like that, bright knot of what
we wanted converging
on a raised dais in the middle
it was so good it was kind of like
being adjacent to that real
opulent feeling no words
just the sky and what falls
out of it the surface of
each day marked with a kind of
temperance in my mind
I render it and loop it back
each day the sun so fucked up
spitting bright heaven into me
and I’d like to perfect this
drag a form out from under
the long morning and hold it up
to the light, beauty, the distortion
you have to remember it now
you have to look through it
the warped and the artificial
and if this feels so much like art
then I fucked it up, I want
the tender reasons, the drifting
light of an August night
spent at the lake watching forms
go cold as the day drains away
from what it felt like to feel
so available I’m aware of how
arrogant I sound how tapped in I am
to the abstract but I do believe in
love as a means of suspending time
before it goes through the open
grid of what we mean and who
we are when we wake up
with a reason to, and something
like the sky flooding the room
with duration, something total
and felt like life like light
suspended above a building
the moon a still image held
aloft in the retinal factory
hollowed out a sentence only
to sound emotionally reticent
I walked beneath a fucked up
sky, thinking you back through
the cool streaming resurrect
the cliche for a moment
tell me something stupid
and meaningless, I get so
embarrassed sometimes honestly
and visibly crushed up against
the surface of what I wanted
to show you and what
I had to do to get back there
for a minute I thought I saw you
you loved that moment those colors
elegant meshwork of angles
going partly lost in the half
light of another August gone
and in the parking lot I got so
fucked up I couldn’t see anything
terrible, and almost nightly
I see the forms in things in music
so permanently I retreat back
through the voice, but I can’t
remember what you sound like
so I go so variously through
the sliding glass doors
in the middle of my thinking
these dark petals of form
that fall across the surface of
my daily wandering awful
breaking into what, something
real enough to touch
a glance sustained that leaves me
feeling something like an edge
to this a soft light and immanence
quietly dilating here in the fracture
so I get up and walk around
into the absence that’s you tonight