Before heading out for good, 2016 left a box of handwritten papers at our doorstep. In it, 2016 explained its many bumps, knocks, skips, failures and wins – the good and bad and the weird. But we’re sworn to secrecy on its mysteries, on the contents of that box. The only thing we’re allowed to disclose are 2016’s endnotes, compiled by 2016 in its strict script on graph paper. We’ve reprinted the endnotes in full so you can attempt to unravel the mysteries yourself.
1. Alessandra Bava. The Years of Lead. 2016. “The fury of hummingbirds, fluttering wings that are no sketched mask but strokes / of painterly revolution…”
2. “I wear snakes as garters.” Stacy Skolnik, poet.
3. Donald Raymond writes, “There is data still to collect.” This includes the “decay rate of enchanted pumpkins, / or the terminal velocity of apples; / how long a princess can sleep.” Indeed, his research has shown “for now, the chalk is quiescent / haze in sunlight.”
4. Inspired by the Bruce Alford lines “your seas / (of Nectar, of Showers, of Clouds) / that soak up everything”
5. Armin Tolentino observed that “A gaggle of caterpillars could nuzzle / a dead wolf down to bone in a few hours.“
6. Specifically Christina Seymour’s small collections of words that say: “inner compulsion / to draw corn on a large circle of moon” and “fat birds pick at all the new buds, sending their faces to the sun”
7. George Kalamaras’s poem where he writes, “It is easier to roast Yukon Gold potatoes than to divvy up my mouth.” But, actually, inspiration came from “the belly of the mother, / inside of which whirred the world.”
8. It was Catori Sarmiento who once wrote, “Tuesday is a crab.”
9. “the debris of days glitter gray / into a year, your 21st, accumulating here” – Sharon Kennedy-Nolle
10. Ann Howells. Night holds too much dark unknown—this world, next. Digital words on digital page. 2016.
---
Jessica Dyer
Associate Editor, Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal
Arsenic Lobster on Facebook
