February is January’s Shade
We’re now in the gray of afternoon,
the sky a single cloud, high shadow
painting a shade of comedian
sadness onto the clay tiled roof.
The silver birch is no longer shining
no longer growing out in the open,
no, now it’s a static hibernation standstill.
This is the delusion:
not that I can change the world
but that it’s always changing me.
The birds still crow, but not ecstatic.
They’re motioning through all their goings.
In the background deregulations
strip away feelings because we are
a country bent on rules, what’s more,
less restriction in particular
if you are a corporation
but many regulations if you are
a uterus
The north bark on the tree exhibits a rule,
though no moss follows it. I want to be
like the moss, or like the
ornamental plums down the road who
can’t tell whether it’s winter or not;
they’ve been holding onto their buds
since November. With this Celsius,
it’s below zero. They must not know.
whose rules do I cinch up like a
corset whose rules do I
bone up whose rules do I put
on what bones do I wear
February is January’s shade,
and I am not changing
but something is changing
inside of me.
whose half-moon room points
every chair toward a single
throne framed by curtains whose
rooms do we resemble whose
assemblies cinch up who
owns these bones
Friend, I am with you in Lowell,
with you watching YouTube with Robert Grenier
who describes Vermont, putting the garden to bed,
from somewhere in London. I am
with you in our backyard, here watching
gray-haired winter fatten up.
We must not stay
in the background.
We must not stay in the shade.
The Militarism of Spiking Anti-Bird Technology
A single-engine drones low overhead
and here I am in the backyard on this
concrete slab in a plastic lawnchair the
backyard smells of cracked earth and at the
grocery store I saw a bird perched atop
the spiking anti-bird technology
Hey, this is great! she seemed to say with her
lithe jumping. Hey, hey, thanks for this bird-like
gymnasium, hey! And now I’m in the
backyard, not faring as well in the heat
but there’s no going in, each lesser goldfinch
sings weet-weet-two-woo and other kinds
of chortling wheezes before the door. The
purslane, too, echoes a squeaky weet-weet
under my sneakers and this kind of
ventriloquism is only possible
when the audience looks the other way.
I am looking toward the sideyard and don’t
know which goldfinch is the quiet one. This
heat won’t let me clean my head. The
brother-heat pulling me under, this swamped-in-
prehistoric-like-thinking
but present in burning.
*
point of fact: the sun
is just overhead,
the slab under my
feet leads up to the
watermelon patch
and the only shade
is next door, without
counting the side yard,
I mean, but the slab’s
still radiating
heat there. The swamp moves
from my mind to my
legs. I am
overcome.
*
I hear a pentatonic wind, it’s
2016, it’s deafeningly calm and I’m crying somehow
because of it. Or because of the world,
I mean, you know? It’s summer, or it’s
almost fall and Fred Moten and Stefano
Harney say that so much of business logistics
begins in the military and then
the boomerang angles back onto citizens:
shipping containers, pallets,
and the Internet with its propaganda.
Drones. Now we all live near an airport.
Laura Wetherington and Curtis Emery have been collaborating for almost 10 years. Their work is interested in exploring the possibilities of cooperative writing and reading, the power of location over our imagination, and language’s place in the modern landscape. Their work has appeared in Conjunctions, ELDERLY, Pamenar Press, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s blog 1508, and others.
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