District 9 as an Animated GIF
Stale breath at the gates
of dawn, a cloud of gnats.
Chain link gates that whine
and rattle. To wring
from cloth all that has been must,
to fix on a small set of verbs
that militate a rhythm. To wring
of gray the cold sidewinding rain.
*
She told me that the semi-retired
PE teacher turned football coach
is a dirt ass. That the work of the sleigh
is to parade him like a king
while leveraging the weight of teenagers,
that the work of shoulders is to smash
then creak and click. 100 yards of that
for each line is nothing when we
consider all that he has ogled and all
that we have staked to Friday night.
The work of the bar plank is to surface
what gets quaffed and keep up
some semblance of decorum,
a yard of distance from the lechery
of eyes and hands. She says the work
of refrigeration is described in arcane
thermodynamic laws she failed
to memorize. The work of thumbs
on blurred yearbooks is to sculpt unflattering
maquettes of our perduring selves.
Heraclitus and the Carp
I don’t have it in for Heraclitus the Obscure, but I suspect most of his fragments are about me.
It’s how aphorisms should work, I guess, singling us out while making a general case; they’re
like embossed matchbooks from businesses you’re sure must’ve existed at one point.
You’re either the kind of person for whom the past or the future is tiresome, as both states
remain unknowable. Don’t ever confuse disbelief with wonder. It’s possible to be friends with
and even go fishing with your ex in-laws, he tells me as I steer the outboard motor.
The lines get tangled in a polysyndeton of swamp horse tail as we cut the motor to drift and he
extolls the importance of hands to hold the catch and a bucket of cool water to store it in for the
ride back to the harbor and he spots a VHF television antenna collapsed in the sand bar and
instructs me to mind the transmissions that I take in for the way they culminate in what we might
call ostensive consciousness.
Heraclitus, like any good fisher, has his secrets: the downward tows around aqueducts and the
cold pools beneath the poplar copses beyond the underpasses of the whining interstate. He holds
them beneath his cap. He has footprints tattooed on his shoulder to illustrate how we’re scarified
by an unseen presence that walks beside us at all times.
We listen to the sound of jet ski engines. What are these little epidemics of noise that crop up on
your waters? he asks. I tell him a jet ski is a watercraft that never crosses the same wake twice.
This little moment between non-existence and death is a real anomaly, he says as he jerks his
line. A carp thwacks the aluminum hull. He picks it up, massages down the dorsal fins, and
considers it in the sunlight before release. Heraclitus wants to know if I’ve ever gone fishing
with my father.
When I hesitate, he says, No matter. Filial piety only makes a stone boat of the heart. There are
shiny lures that draw us from our depths, and steel hooks that barb us to the shore. I keep using
parentheses to explain the function of the parenthetical, but it turns out I don’t have the brackets
here to string the catch and show what’s been amended.
It almost isn’t summer, which means something different than summer's almost gone. I press the
choke and set my weight to pull the rewind start. The fish we didn’t come to catch begin to
scatter.
Saxitoxin and Their Analogs as Non-Fungible Tokens
You don’t have to exactly cry anymore. You have to cry
with precision. No vague grief, the lachrymose sky brims over
with exactitude evermore, and somewhere in northwest Ohio
you’ll start by moving the elegiac around in relation to the margins,
and you can only do this if your fear calculates the span
it takes to turn your eyes from nothing. Don’t bother to kick
the snow off your boots, in other words. In other words
softens the phrasing’s landing, measuring a simultaneously
mimetic and metonymic tautologous set while accumulating uselessly.
Country air has been floated as a cure for several centuries.
The country air floats. Not a cure
for several centuries, but for several centuries, a cure.
Sea air specifically for neurasthenia, bowel disorders,
tuberculosis (you’re thinking of Vivienne
Haigh-Wood and Thomas Stearns Eliot at Margate
and the moonlight of their sedatives; Kafka coughing blood in Zürau).
There may yet be an opportunity to bind the ligands,
those neurotoxins retrieved from marine alkaloids in shellfish
and extracted through high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC),
to voltage-gated sodium ion channels to relieve pain.
The peril lies in not achieving isolation of the pain transmitters
and arresting the benumbed patient’s heart. Pain
is a string of metonyms, in other words. PAIN
(Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) is an acronym
whose effectiveness exceeds its beauty. Metaphors
can make things bearable, in other words, and the shellfish
that sup from toxic algal blooms at sea, clawed saviors,
saltwater digitigrades, chitinous hierophants that turn
bright blue in death, have long rejected the Cartesian dualism
that begs us to synthesize a dog-rheumed afternoon into narcosis.
If successful it might lead to less addiction, or it might lead
to a proliferation of cheaper designer
drugs on the streets. O crustacean with phosphorous
in your flesh, may you suffer that we do not. May you wire
our brains to seek out not painlessness but controlled pain,
is a prayer nobody teaches us to say.
The Answer to Your Question Is, “Her Mother Said the Dentist is an Artist of the Teeth”
The first human sentence was etched into a lice comb
to express a simple wish:
May this tusk root out the lice of the hair
and beard.
It’s snowing this afternoon. Another half-elegy
dusts the fallen leaves.
In the bathroom mirror, the grooved heads of molars
are the brown of butterscotch.
So write it all out, mediate
between oblivion and purgation
if you believe the gone still share our grief.
Is this mid-century modern? This spare
pale space with bright marble tabletops
heavy on mahogany legs.
Nothing sticks.
What sounds less plausible than a car wreck?
Take the eyes’ donation as an emblem of her spirit.
Take the splenetic from the spleen and laud
what has been given.
It’s bad counsel to instruct us to offer it up.
A brass faucet head sits upon a cairn
of Petoskey stones.
The wallpaper pattern blooms in its golden ratio.
The Spirit of Saint Louis as a Non-Fungible Token
At the Henry Ford Museum lunch counter,
you are your own waiter and, in that light
that wafts through the three-quarter roundels,
your own drunk too. The hay rakes, bailers
and other agrarian implements Ford collected
ratify this idea that you were self-sufficient
once and could be again, but in this quiet place
who will recreate the chatter of the lachrymose
and nearly gone? What’s in your head, John?
The thaumaturgy of the Fordson tractor. This epicene.
The Spirit of Saint Louis flown across the sea
by fascist Lindbergh clunks above its placard like a flivver
in the great era of the flivver. What manned flight
has given us the museum can transpose onto the genius
of a lone progenitor. What gets piloted in the afternoon
best keep a definitive eyeline on the gloaming.
Dawn only arrives for the stationary stationed.
We don’t love the museum because we love
the sanitized figures it curates. It’s how scrupulous
and clean it makes us feel, the heuristic
of its glassed-off artifacts, the marmoreal
achievement of the tiles on which we walk.
These poems were part of The Poetry Issue 2023, curated by Shireen Quadri. © The Punch Magazine. No part of these should be reproduced anywhere without the prior permission of The Punch Magazine.
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