Freshly Bathed We Return to Wallow

‘Hidden Noise.’ Kathryn Cowles. Wood, cloth, paper, twine, thread, furniture, building materials, body. 2017

from ‘The Archive’

Tree Frogs

One starts. The still heat is a blown curtain.
The curtain wavers then—now two of them—

and another from beyond the blue agave.
Soon the whistling, wheet-eet-eet, the many,

An Angel of the Anthropocene

They saw too much difference in weathers
but the pink light is hazy with brake dust

how that adjective kills it, dim lands cut
and their forgotten cinema torn to kisses

Notebook for Autobiographical Ecology

I’m sun blind. 

I wake up to green things on my face & echolocate myself in the world by smelling my armpits. 

The arctic swells with grief.

My gut distressed like a morning hymn

Miss America

At dawn when traffic lights burn like roses
I feel pity akin to love
For the little deviants of wild
Turkeys skulking around this city.

Proof of Hunger

I feed my body less and want more        the surplus
I was promised          storehouses of grain        plains of locust
don’t signify a thing without hunger    
telos that defers its own ending

The Persistence of Torture

The dog violet, pressing a flat ear to the ground,

has news of great importance:

it is spring

and jealousy turns its blade again.

from “The Prospect”

the river was central

each branch arterial

pulling land along with it

in form of pebbles, sand, agglomerate

Elegy with Forest and TVs

Men surrounded by lumber and nails, then suddenly a house with two kids, a dog, swing set
and barbeque, spinning on its street among other homes
on the green grass of this planet.

Young Blue Heron

One thing to do
until you can’t
is wait, foot tentative
testing for deceit

What Is the Anthropocenester?

1. Crisis is a rusted minivan throwing down spike strips on the highway of teleology. The Anthropocenester is in the passenger seat. 

2. Crisis bangs on the table and demands immediate action in the form of risk management or hazard mitigation. The Anthropocenester wipes up the coffee that spilled.

from “A Wilderness”

Yes, I did hold a plague in my pupils. Yes, I did lift up my dress and walk through fields to kill each beetle and pest. The last landscape designated protected was the swamp. The marsh and its salt, weedy tufts of grass stuck up above the flood.

Hormone

Anxiety waits 
for a table 
under a cave painting.