Two Poems
Manifest Density
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Expand outward. Be complicit that this hand is your hand. You are the fist on this vertiginous soil. You are queen of all you surfeit. Create your motion. Pant your lag and lace off your acres. Frill the empty hand with laughing chilblains and nettle the wild. O pioneers!
*
Expulse windward. Be confident that canned is your brand. You are the theorist of soiled gin. You are clean of all you unmade. Berate your nation and flaunt your stag. Race off your aches. Bill the empire blind with leaking chiles and settle for mild bandoliers.
*
This band is yours, man. Tweet zero dark tourism. Fill your sentry stand with coughing children.
Green Belt Buckle
The thin membranes of borders dictate there will always be a brisk traffic in pets and parts and a shifting cadre of underemployed shuttling between workplaces on the nation’s most dangerous commutes while spines
atrophy and sciatica cripples them just enough so lifting a pile of ungraded essays becomes a blackout situation but not enough to stop working. The cyborg professor feels her steel-cut oats. She meets her creator
above the Arctic Circle to test out the repressive hypothesis and argue for the sleek speed of the animal mind: leopard sentience, reptile brain, survival of the fittest in an admittedly dry cold, controlled reproduction.
Trophy politics: even a rabbit will sprout antlers if mounted at the right angle and with the requisite amount of force. The Green Belt has a shiny silver buckle that leaves nasty welts on the back and buttocks. Fill the Blue Box with bubble wrap.
Animals come in and out of season. Crows fall from the sky like unexploded bombs planted face down in snowdrifts, wings spread in a glossy arch. The tiny possum tracks in the snow: the handprints of babies. Most hunters are conservationists.
