KEEP PLANNING – Ty Holter

The Loud Woods The loud woods came from the underbrush of another, older wood. The loud woods had a floor below pine needles and cones. The loud woods were known to harbor doubles. The loud woods grew out from the carrion and dried creek beds where it was found. The loud woods grew out of screen doors. The loud woods grew out of a hollow. The loud woods were about to begin when flanked by dryers. The loud woods flared out like a brass instrument, like a flugelhorn. The loud woods fell over on themselves. The loud woods were not of nature, or were, as softer metals are. I went into them maladjusted, and came out maladjusted and wet with leaves plastered to my face and arms. The loud woods at the edges of weddings with thoughts that occur from a gravel mound. The loud woods that can only be thought of in short bursts. The loud woods that had distinctive regions in them, or semi-discrete zones like rooms separated by curtains and rearranged themselves in the wind. In one room there were only knotty pines spaced evenly and all roughly the same size fading into the other room, chaotic with mosses, newts, and rotting logs and more prone to the discovery of these as materials for the eventual completion of the other room. The rodents go mostly unnoticed but are here at all hours and somehow live in the hours. I think they are amused by lunatics. It's best we go out in shifts. Winged Hourglass Motif 1. Problems arise, the elevation accounted for. Activity picks up in the courtyard, which is unexpected, and dies down, which is natural. We ordinarily would have kept to ourselves, what we did not care to see into, though given our proximity to the other's mind, we still sometimes wondered about. This feature of the miniature city, the bare final resting chambers stacked one on top of the other for more than a century. The stained glass removing the normalcy from the rooms. 2. At the apartment, the painting wrapped that was never hung, it was explained to us that there was no one he could trust to have hung it. It was like that, with the ones he had in front of him, to choose from, according to him. And in the book of paintings the one wrapped and behind the couch could not be found, from a period of experimentation that turned out to be short-lived, in which a process of stenciling over the gradient gave it depth, though in places where filled in completely, it flattened again. 3. The unwanted succulent weed that found its way onto the balcony has done well for itself, deriding her potted ones. It used to be you would sprinkle some tiger dung you could order from a catalog. The dung was pulverized and needed watering, and was for keeping the rabbits out. She'd ask Sarah, at that time her hair dresser, would she save her a week's worth of hair. But in the end, the excrement proved to be too foreign, the human hair anodyne: the wildlife was just not interested in the flowers. And though she did not win the pony from collecting the bubble gum wrappers as a child, it was not that pony but another that would enter her life, later, at a different stage, when she was older and wanted it less. Inheritance Put plainly as there is no time: several regulars in trench coats have developed new uses for the excess forty. The retired silos for all we know could house nomads; same goes for the gravel path with multiple names where it's said that at its narrowest and most foreboding there are scores of perennial tents. Accounts vary. I know you hoped things would turn out. Conflict like anything gets more efficient. The hectare's lone surveyor never made it back though his journals (recovered) set out on what seems was a mystic initiative to make note of the observable qualities and thoughts appertaining to each of its deedless square inches. Moved about in a crouching spiral as he went. Appears his inch had been compressing imperceptibly for many years. He writes that "In order to destroy heaven it will need to be made into stone." Wild cabbages and various winter roots and onions aid me now in the relaying of all this. Do not bother to write. That it should reach me as I lurch further into the interior in the morning is slim. Or if you must write: leave your letter in an heirlooms tin to an heir who's illiterate. ***

Ty Holter is the author of Extended Stay (Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks, 2023). His work has appeared in Firmament, Minor Literature[s], and elsewhere. A teacher and poet, he lives in Western Massachusetts. 07 May 2025