THE DEPRESSION ERA
Or the way the wind sweeps across a desert. I
tried to grow a heart for you (it didn’t take). Or how
the landscape fades when the city grows its way beyond
lines drawn, enough to contain all want. An imagined I
spoken to with every breath drawn from a well that keeps
me guessing if the way light escapes is a sign that gravity
has to decay after holding together a universe. Now
I imagine an I that could say the things it should have
stopped being in denial of before. Or how the organs
that fail indicate rupture, fragmentation. How they appear
and reappear in the same frame without anyone
misdiagnosing them. A thing unseen is a negation
of what is sensed, so draw a heart instead and hope
no one notices just staying in bed all day. My eyes
find some birds that black out the sky just to keep
from wondering how far it goes. The atmosphere
creates parallax, or a way to put things out of order
to keep people guessing forever. Yet the skin obscures
too, the organs which fail are always the ones cut out
last when they rot through the center and risk
systemic failure. Systems are failing but no one
waits for the doctor to cover the body so it just gets
burned in the nearest yard or eyelid. Material world or
world as material, a point of calcification, a point from
which to forgive the sins which aren’t recorded
anywhere else. Or the river down which the body was
never seen again, where the stones that weighed the
body down were never swept again until the sea
collapsed around them. Or the spasm that throws
blindly the clot into the chambers that make them
startle and stop, fire out and misfire and misfade, a
façade of plausible when the aching becomes a way of
biting through the bone to sever an arm that got
trapped. Or how memory bends back around, so reach
through the legs far enough to catch it before it falls
over onto a face, as if to prove the shape of memory is
really just denial to everyone who isn’t me. What goes
hiding what goes hiding and hidden into the scene of
the film, in between the cuts of the frames per second
that can’t be seen because the brain is not the screen
onto which the film was ever projected in the first
place. The way across, the way through to the final
moments in which the object of the world is seen as
what it is: the world as whole. Not as container of
objects but as object (as the bridge burns or car crashes
or sun collapses into the oilfire of sea). In the longer
version of the treatment, out of view so that another
tension can grow, can escape of the waves in which the
rocks are surely smoothed by now. Or as the wave
upon rock or as negation of wave that is wave. Or as
acclimatization. Or as acclaim or the way memory
seems to rewrite whenever written into too deeply or
just on the surface of a prayer or sermon or madrigal
sung in dreary tone to evoke the terror of being known
to every sinner who goes unacknowledged for their sin.
The world as recalcitrant, that which denies in the face
of denial, in the space understanding of the grace
which was left over in the moments the universe
sprang forth, swam forth of detail, of bridgematter.
WATCH THE CORNERS
Maybe it’s a blessing that we get to die.
The world I cannot recommend to you.
My miracle year was any before this one.
Rubbing the ashes of two good days into a wounded knee.
The trajectory seems off: the mortar doesn’t hit just the things in its path.
The creek is always rising but you don’t always get to see the houses that flood.
Dead spot in a mirror, or the way the bottom of the ocean runs with rivers of sand.
The warmth of a void welcoming beyond ecology.
The tick of time is counter rhythm, or the value of getting away from who you are.
Poetry asks you to betray yourself by letting out the parts of yourself you would have preferred to keep in.
I learned to shut up about myself.
The things that are just for me, I keep in, keep silent.
Sometimes a whole career is playing against type.
The smaller crisis is reimagined within the larger one.
I grieve a death that no one else seems able to determine.
—
Amish Trivedi is a poet, critic, and educator from Stone Mountain, GA. He is the author of FuturePanic (co•im•press, 2021), Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed (Shearsman Books, 2019), and Sound/Chest (Coven, 2015). He has an MFA from Brown University’s Program in Literary Arts and a PhD in English and Critical Theory from Illinois State University. He is currently a post doctoral researcher at the University of Delaware.