American Molten by James D'Agostino
Poetry editor Nicolette Ashley Visciano on today’s poem: What are you left with when tender ballad and commanding poeticism are melded? Within this coalescence, James D'Agostino presents the reader with "American Molten" and a new way of understanding the power of a palindrome. Enacting a call to "keep your ears on the horizon, / let the nearby slosh you to sleep," D'Agostino masterfully swells the pitch and rhythm of "American Molten" like its own remarkable record, meant to be listened to forwards and backwards and forwards again until one's heart has no choice but to be caught like a snapper in a swinging red net, tender as an Elvis tune.
american molten
A lot of fears we call irrational but how do we really know? In the nest of the chest flutter little razor blade bird babies maybe. Aibohphobia is fear of only those palindromes with steep enough sides to get stuck in forever. Listening to Elvis backwards doesn’t summon a thing unless you count more and more America, where Tender backwards is red net and the heart’s a grunting swung drippy catch of snapper dumped into the hold of a storm-tossed steamer. You can hear it list and pitch in weird swells of voice, so just keep your ears on the horizon, let the nearby slosh you to sleep. Backwards forwards, it doesn’t matter which way you face. What’s going to kill you does. A couple years before the draft and his mother’s death and all the army buddies with amphetamines in footlockers Elvis sang Love Me Tender backwards all the way to Aura Lea, the sentimental Union Army standard filched for the tune, which at least says, sunshine came along with thee and swallows in the air, but his version is pretty bare and even forwards it’s just giving orders. Love me take me tell me. It’s command form balladry, it’s marching orders adoration, calling fall in. And once you’re in, here’s how you sing along. Place your non-tonal afterbreath first, so it triggers expectations of a whisper, then place your hand in mine.
James D'Agostino is the author of Nude With Anything (New Issues Press), The Goldfinch Caution Tapes, winner of the 2022 Anthony Hecht Prize (Waywiser Press), and Build Your Castle Out of Sugar Cubes All Your Enemies Have Tongues, which won the 2025 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize. He’s published chapbooks which won prizes from Diagram/New Michigan, CutBank Books, and Wells College Press. His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Forklift Ohio, Conduit, Mississippi Review, TriQuarterly, Flyway, and elsewhere. He teaches at Truman State University, lives in Missouri and Iowa City, IA, with his partner, the poet and book artist Karen Carcia.
