• {Click here for PDF version}

    SEPTEMBER BECOMES THE JET AGE

    for Emmett

    First the sky is two blues
    then twenty-two

    a reflexive act of flattery
    Chimney and smokestack

    become that pixelated neither –
    each blue open in equal part

    to something and nothing
    independent of light’s

    calculus against touch: fingertip
    to glass, deduction mined to mind

    Someone says measure (graphite)
    Someone says signal (coltan)

    We ask for clarity
    The signal does not make it

    down the line. (Our argument
    for expansion has expanded

    to include every pixel after or before.)
    In good faith we gather to explain

    to ourselves what might be happening
    to our selves – hands, as they say

    before the flame, a collaborative act
    like leaves turning after first frost

    (Yes, yes: woodsmoke as a given
    country’s promise and failure –

    how to tell an ear
    from a hole in the ground

    a punchline from nostalgia.)
    After some debate

    upon this we can agree:
    The missing plane idles even now

    at the edge of a salt flat
    What feels comfortable is just

    pre-occupation. What sounds
    promising, placeholder. In the capitol

    you can tell a patriot from a priest
    by the size of the riot, but not

    vice versa. Someone asks if we
    know more than this. She asks

    come morning will there be
    a twenty-third or -fourth blue

    At first we mistake her voice
    for a factory, then for a fact

    Someone else’s voice breaks
    into song: “September in New England

    let loose the cats and the dogs
    we’re drivin’ home –”

    You are always on one side of a country
    when I am on another



    AESTHETICS OF AN INCOMING ROCKET
    (or, THE HISTORY OF RUSSIAN CINEMA)


    after Tarkovsky

    fodder through
    fodder through the gates

    to where the gates go where
    a slap on the back likens habit to luck

    the birds reply chorus-like
    “it is too early for beauty”

    the hexagon proves ownership
    nothing else

    whereas the pentagon
    aesthetic of the recent open world:

    it is time to let go
    time (fodder through the open gates)

    to fold her through
    the iron gates

    by force of
    a slap on the back makes fodder

    luck look
    fodder in a bus

    fodder in busses
    fodder in a train

    (folder: “in the trains”)
    fodder across the plains

    the asymmetry is just
    for aesthetics told her

    (fodder with beautiful legs)
    (proves you are stronger than the enemy)

    bird fodder heard fodder
    herd fold her told her

    another day of sacrifice
    another what proves we give

    back the bull his entrails
    what was twenty

    minutes ago a bull
    fits together in black and white

    (from bread to dough
    from dough to batter)

    we dress the bull in his skin
    the bull comes back to life

    folded head to toe
    back to flour sacks

    back on the wagon
    against the executioner’s block until

    the knife pulls away
    fodder taking back

    the stab the slice
    the bleed and so on

    and on so
    it goes to the stockyards

    to the mind the rye returns
    train’s reversal

    away from whence
    it came fodder to

    that dream that herd that
    heard we fodder

    for (or against)
    everything we have

     

    Adrian Lürssen is the author of Human Is to Wander, winner of the 2022 Colorado Prize for Poetry selected by Gillian Conoley, and the chapbook Neowise (Trainwreck Press, 2022). His work has appeared in Fence, Indiana Review, Boston Review, Phoebe, Posit, Second Stutter, and elsewhere. Originally from South Africa, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

    SHARE
    Previous Post: Five Prose Poems from Data Mind by Joanna Fuhrman Next Post: NERVE METER: Ceremonial Abyss with Brenda Iijima, Katy Mongeau, Rachelle Rahmé, Jared Daniel Fagen & Chloe Bliss Snyder at Black Spring Books

    Archives