2025
There is nobody here but us chickens
-George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous,” Section 17
The red, the gout, the condensed fury & labor, spraying out, my
transmission was melting down; I felt watched, my students were doxed
vomit gushed in great gasping heaves from every digital slot
C eats the first apple from K’s orchard, just a few feet from the sidewalk
over the wood chips wounded by the electric company, cream flesh
stipled green, summer wasn’t over--& the year felt washed
the men bent howling for blood
I’d rather a poet be a drug dealer than a prize winner in this sludge
a day of crushing, twilight in a shell, fishtailing along the glittering edge
of exhaustion, brother chuckles caught one in the gasper broken
& repeated across refractive planes, push it push it push, the burning
cylinder, tattooing every membrane, through which light
J slowly bouncing his son in one arm, in the doorway
saying what he heard over the wires about the jails of the regime
who will be believed when they play insane?
2025
It is the air of atrocity
-George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous,” Section 18
the tree thick w/cherries half shading thyme, oregano, weeps red sap in the heat as foxglove sheds its pink, freckled slippers, begins to swell with its tachycardia inducing seed as a rooster crows from an undisclosed location in the neighborhood & bees crawl whole-bodied into the blossoms as the lime leaves of the straggling rose, an astringent, sweet bloom above the unravelling peonies while the pear leaves of the paw paw sapling begin to brush their burlap shroud & ants have created aphid farms on the chest-high crowns of our two year apples, service berries, thin-wristed, hold up their fruiting bracts a few inches from the sidewalk the traffic of Riley, the headphones of passersby, in this city, a sleepy and corrupt edge of the the imperial core, the hard beans & corn just starting to quake in the soil, Gerard Winstanley said squash, all its weight & sprawl, was a metaphor for something, I can’t remember what back to the bee balm, well, it’s coming along
And if a missile blowing holes in a Haifa oil refinery may be a step to saving lives & if getting bolt cutters is one step on the way to shutting down the concentration camp they’re setting up off the freeway 600 Colvin Road & if 3,000 arrests a day is a million a year is ethnic cleansing & if they starved & beat inmates & inmates seized their own lives & set themselves on fire before the reign of terror & if you want to do more than hold a sign, signify, but don’t know where to start & if the cops won’t give you a police report & yr car is stranded across the border & is that a college or a petri dish for F-35 parts & if they murdered Mosab Emad Ali, the man who was doing a million things to get all that donation money turned into food for his people & if those donations made it feel like you were doing anything, anything at all & if the horizon is a great broken stone that only seems to grow & if the moment that shears everything in two arrives
