Theory of the Preceding

Andrew Cantrell

The south edge is a rift at the lake-bluff exposures where tonight far locusts beat its grayish bands to sere and airy scars for formally it is everywhere scarps but tonight it is both and it is also gravel and wing drone that is it's a tolled sour-grass a-hum and offertory and this range too that we've found where the Lake Michigan bluff exposures are not clearly back-formations of the oldest till of names but rather as blood high in oak and sycamore they are now defined as a minimum of two or a rift or a ghosting twitch of an animal other in trailing pose for really this range is a bluff exposure of the grate of the wax-slow flow of years around Lake Michigan's basin or it's how across from us the harbors are in most places sandier with hushed tokens of wealth wound down and winnowed in rushed and tidal rows or how the theory of the preceding may be found in the most noteworthy characteristics of its making as if of this evening or rather its dun oil fanning maritime skies of which we may say it's a glacial description of this place as if it were a gravid old and planetary distance plus its geological age precisely where the draft and draw of wind-deft sails at Lake Michigan bluffs may act as an exposure of the latter-day in summer lake-spray of the here-and-now where a difference is or may be presumed to be dabbed shut now sunless and run and the lake's now a lacking sum undone in the total of this.


Andrew Cantrell has recent work appearing or forthcoming in SPECS, Arsenic Lobster, Beecher's Magazine, Emergency INDEX, Heavy Feather Review, Posit, Lana Turner, Upstairs at Duroc, AlteredScale, Pocket Litter, and Otoliths. He lives in Chicago where he works as a union organizer, does things with words, and co-curates PSA Projects, an itinerant, experimental screening series. He recently completed a residency in Literary Arts at the Banff Centre.