This love is like the ghost of Schrödinger’s dead cat

I’m sure my moans could carry
across 4000 miles. More maybe.
They go as the crow flies when I think
you’re in another woman’s bed.
I have my fingers crossed
against it— the thought of your closed curves,
your celestial bodies ascending
in euphony…
nauseating—
warm hands, heads, tongues;
caresses are just speculative structures and, god,
I’m linking them all,
killing Spacetime.
Your disparate points should be mine.

In another version, somewhere,
a ghost cat stuck up an impossibly branched tree;
its non-stop crying across dimensions
for the you
who wants to be with me
can be heard right through Earths 1-42.


roifaineantpress

Self-lit

You’re humming through the streets,
self-lit. I have to correct strangers
who touch your head without asking,
as if to bless you or to take a blessing from you.
When we leave the city, you become
a boy hunting locusts. Nature stuns you—
you load up your pockets and want to bring it
home with us, but Nature stays with nature, I say,
a refrain learned from another mother.
You cannot be unpuzzled by things,
but you marshal all your sweet bravado for me,
who tries but never beats you in a game of chess.
I witness the rook and Queen
moving inside your thinking, squaring
and hewing to pathways of wins, losses.
Childhood’s end is always menacing,
apparent places of stars mark its outer limits.
It heaves up in you when you lose,
when you rage, when you’re afraid.
Glowering out of a fever dream, your eyes shine
as you confess in the dark I was the monster.
You show me a hornet’s nest on a bed of cotton,
hold it up as an offering. I wonder with you
at what you hold—
     summer rivers that show bracken corners,
     eye agate marbles,
     daggerwings of our days in the city
     built of strangers,
         in a country built of sky.
When I pull you close,
what will flee trembles in you.


KC Trommer

[Oye! This is an apartment building ode]

Oye! This is an apartment building ode.
But not just any ode, an ode about breathing,
walking, jumping, running, skipping people.
An ode to a time where we’d remember what
odes felt like to read outside. An ode about
oding so hard it boxes itself into a sonnet.
Harder than bus stop benches and light rail
seats, taxes, and systemic poverty. The oding
of this poem is an apartment building sonnet
about people stacked up like bricks like words
in a sonnet. People that will tap your shoulder
to make sure you’re listening to the fact that this
poem is a token, a favor, a shirt off their back.
Oye! This is The Apartment Building Ode.

There’s Freestyle, Hip Hop, and Bachata on the steps
depending on the time of day we pick up groceries.
There are bikes by the curb and notebooks on those steps,
soda bottles, 2 quarter juices, and candy wrappers in bags.
There is a 10pm curfew for noise and the music plays
until 9:59, because the stoop DJ wakes up early too.
There are “No loitering on the stairs” signs in every hall-
way though it is understood that what we do isn’t aimless.
There is the smell of food, home-cooked or homemade,
plantains in C5, Hot Pockets in A3 and Chinese in the lobby.
There are lovers, soothsayers, tall-tale tellers, doers, hustlers,
potatoes, flowers, lighters, and so many hand gestures.

This is a concrete box that we call home.
There is a life we’ve learned to love and live.


Dimitri Reyes Poet/

#haikuThursday

(2022)

5 snow on sliding ice
7 true shoe stories dangling
5 above beyond reach


36 poems dot org (Boulder, CO)

Basement Suite

Karen Solie (2020)

Left to our use are the fixtures and appliances
Repented of by the homeowners
Who don't realize this is a way to know them.

In the basement one is closer to God
Because closer to consequence
To the creatures no one loves but the specialists.

Rice weevil, bean weevil, rose weevil, pea weevil,
Flour, black vine, and strawberry weevils,
A weevil to every purpose under heaven.

The basement is a tree house in the roots
Think of it that way
And cold on five sides, like childhood

When water in the pipes was a talking animal
And it was advertised that soil neutralized
The toxins applied to it, that

Our bodies did, and that the sea
Carried poison on its back into the hills.
Our faces to the wall, to radial domestic passages

Beyond it, heartbeats and adjustments
Attenuated through the half-space, lo-fi
The light is radio light.

The house tries to forget we are here
Yet there are bars on the windows
In some places, like childhood.

A slight clinging smell is associated.
Every living situation has one.
It's not the Underworld, for Christ's sake

Which is everywhere, without depth
But the gaze does learn to creep along the baseboards
And sharpen its knives on them.

Walking on the surface again
If we can bear it
After so long sheltering in place, we may appreciate

More than anyone a bit of natural warmth
Though money flows no more freely up here
Look around you.

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin

Terrance Hayes (2019)

The black poet would love to say his century began
With Hughes or, God forbid, Wheatley, but actually
It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors,
Poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset
Bridges & windows. In a second I’ll tell you how little
Writing rescues. My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not
Especially fun company. A drama queen, thin-skinned,
And skittery, she thought her poems were ordinary.
What do you call a visionary who does not recognize
Her vision? Orpheus was alone when he invented writing.
His manic drawing became a kind of writing when he sent
His beloved a sketch of an eye with an X struck through it.
He meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant
I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.

The Blue Booby

James Tate (1968, Poetry magazine)

The blue booby lives
on the bare rocks
of Galápagos
and fears nothing.
It is a simple life:
they live on fish,
and there are few predators.
Also, the males do not
make fools of themselves
chasing after the young
ladies. Rather,
they gather the blue
objects of the world
and construct from them

a nest—an occasional
Gaulois package,
a string of beads,
a piece of cloth from
a sailor’s suit. This
replaces the need for
dazzling plumage;
in fact, in the past
fifty million years
the male has grown
considerably duller,
nor can he sing well.
The female, though,

asks little of him—
the blue satisfies her
completely, has
a magical effect
on her. When she returns
from her day of
gossip and shopping,
she sees he has found her
a new shred of blue foil:
for this she rewards him
with her dark body,
the stars turn slowly
in the blue foil beside them
like the eyes of a mild savior.