Contentions

 

Multitude by Lia Chechelashvili

A Sparrow girdled within 

a winter garden I stop. 

An enmeshment of baby bats. 

Angles twine in the scene where 

a calico eye’s found bounty. 

I didn’t realize how many 

times I needed to wash my hands. 

In life, I am failing at hygiene. 

A plastic toothpick does more 

harm than good, second person

glaring up at me. Why you 

glaring up at me? 

I’m a ripe egg, feathered,

vulnerable as a blind mouse. So shoot, 

burn, throw your throwing knives. I am 

stronger than, at least, calving glaciers,

I am rising from a deep 

rich brown ground. A darkness falls away. 

Diane Seuss’s “Pentralium” from Modern Poetry

PENETRALIUM 

I wish I could tell you how deep 

the suck goes,

how dark it is and holy, 

it's tragedies siloed. They dot 

the landscape, with oxen, mud hooved, 

and crows. 

Shakespearean but boiled-down, 

a thick gravy, oversalted, 

served on white bread, day-old, 

sold cheap at the bakery outlet. 

It broods on the windland edge,

morbidly forested and bottle green, 

fermented in swamp, dung, skunk, 

and bridled by sorcery, potions, 

bible school puppetry, ogres, faries, 

poorly tendered papier-mache 

good and bad Samaritans. 

Kept awake by good, honest terrors, 

eviction dreams, half-conscious 

fantasies of terrible mothers wielding 

hatchets, but oddly 

free, like a free lunch is free, 

or a vacant lot, or a stinkweed 

bouquet. Just sit with it as you'd sit 

with a legless drunk

 

who wont shut up about the bygone. 

Don't bring your sobriety narratives 

to this bedside, Diane.

Be drunk...it's the only way, raved 

Baudelaire, corkscrewed
through and through with syphilis. 

How artless, this source 

of art, this shit show where 

the greenest 

watercress grows.

Soap Bubbles by Jean Siméon Chardin

We had all the woe on tap.

Aspirin

Aspirin, and the, my God, eszopiclone. Just give it up. Astro poet. Astro farce, designating the constellations? As if you give a fuck? Come, meet me in the closet at Barrymore and Vine. Jungle busts and cheap, sweet wine. Go on, you fakery faker. Let’s both succumb, sourdough, worshipper. I’ll take a bite out of you; do you know the film? Brewster, Packard, Duesenberg, blue? Don’t you know the truth? Skinny owl-eyed dooped de doo? Let’s get it on! Let’s call the cosmos what they are: telescopic assumptions patterned medieval screeches, all the other prehistorica, familia. Ganglia. I want to fuck you, too. For KEK. BOO

Keep Quiet by Hot Chip

Fooling around after a class I took in generative AI