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.