Category: Poetry
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 2: Yuriy Vasilievich Kondratyuk
A dishy dark-pupiled Ukrainian Олександр Гнатович Шаргей His mother married his pater in January and Yuri infiltrated the world that June She taught French in Kiev; a social activist, thus, she was declared insane His great-grandfather had battled Napoleon His father loved physics. Yuri read his books. While fighting on WWI’s Caucasian Front,…
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 1: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
Scarlet fever infected the man as a boy in Izhevskoye taking most of his hearing / He turned to books & spherical trigonometry Before too long, he had carefully worked out Tsiolkovsky’s Formula – an elegant dynamite whooosh! of math for prosecuting stelae up – Next, he penned more to calculate the…
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Pfeilstorchs
Migration was difficult to know. It’s not surprising. Who could say why birds leave for a time, where they go? Aristotle thought that birds just transmuted into a different species when the weather changed. Later, it was assumed that birds hibernated. Charles Morton believed they flew to the moon. Even in the 19th century naturalists…
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Blueblack of the Liar’s Sea
watercolor tapestries of ocean ghosts to breach a dream blurred the foggy mythos of blueback of the Liar’s Sea ancestors of whale-men fought the yellow tentacle devils afire in dark orange boulders a scenic vista of hell sulfuric grey vermilion cavern suddenly seems pale empty of midnight stardrifts, pink nebulas fair but one being,…
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This Lethal Practice
And here, a poet in a forgotten state. Caucasian Albania, we call it, though it was in what is now Azerbaijan. We don’t even know what they called it. And yet, there the poet. He’s brute forcing a piece as we watch. The trappings are familiar. A cat on a windowsill by candlelight. A half-eaten…
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THE INFINITE ROPE TO FOREVER
The winding straightaway flees like a comet’s tail a wedge across basin to a distant range. Down here is my marble head of many basins seeing itself from the side blinking and breathing like the wind outside, rock that’s not yet stone, just stardust, perhaps water as a mist giving slight hope against evil of…
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Cow Milk Silo
Dementia across-lawn strideswither the spurgesunspot. The maid’s Tennessee handsbridge the thistle, her spine of damp & rest,dreaming of an electric scale. Pastures & pasturesof cow milksilo painted, blurring it all impartial.
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Chauvinist Pigs
The riot squad is restlessThey need somewhere to go – Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row” Derek the chauvinist piggyUp to his knee in neckAll coz George wanted a ciggyAnd paid for a pack with dreck Repeat: I can’t breathe, he saidI can’t breathe: sixteen timesa mindfulness exercise gone code redDerek up to his neck in crimes…
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BACKBONE TRAIL
The trail to the park from the valley is crisscrossed with years, like a backbone Maybe the time you hit all greens home from work or maybe the loves that simply stopped, crossing up ahead with mates in hand and exploding nets of new trail. Maybe it’s a bridge over the gorge…
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La Ciel
The methods turn to ridicule:piano & cello, storyboardhemisphere | wecheat panel to panel That old damson euphoria—the tri-state area;trouncing gun houndsof horse-tail— Won’t say. Airborne ricochet,near-flesh made real,atomize out of life le ciel, too late
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WHERE LOVERS CONVERGE
The sweetness of forgetting comes down to falling in love with you each day all over again Where lovers converge there is plenty of time Time doesn’t even come up until the children are safely themselves It’s always been hard to say why we’re here if time is a map other than love…
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The Deep End
My swim trunks flow like algae,under & entrenchedby sterile blue shifts) The once-great sky cavernsinto rapt chlorine gates: The Deep End,where is it? Widening curves warp our towninto nill-lands oblique I have no ground to stand on,the pool holds me helpless— ‘til Death collectsthis daredevilwater-lung &exhausted.