VII)
Daddy longlegs
Fix your supper
Boil cow parsnip
Fry skunk cabbage
After five hundred years of
Mooching around the land mass
In priapic overdrive
Legacies are re-fathered
Who derives incumbency
From bloodroot or catalpa
Pulp mills reeking of greenbacks
Some centuries of vexed cargoes
Propelled by the motive of dirt
Hellacious swamps and patience
Good neighbors hammered these gallows
Sow sorrow seed in furrow deep
Was it perfect when we conquered
Dolor, dollar, occupier
Six times great grand, do I owe you
VIII)
Mine some star shit
Fill your coffers
Annex deep space
Buy up black holes
All the same, redoubts give way
Rodents gnaw and short out wires
Humpty Dumpty rides the blinds
Apophenia holds sway
I continue to proclaim
What is right before my face
Namely, you are in thrall to
A genocidal ethnostate
Yes, I am one of those harpies
Radiant wrecks spouting garbage
No more than a sac of angers
Stricken with visions of ways that
Humans might be de-invented
Ozymandias swans about
Keen to lord it over nothing
IX)
I miss the past
Its folds and stains
Its hooded grace
Its thread of peace
The alternative is what
Rate the hurt, deploy a fix
Rev a dirt bike across time
Brandishing a flaming sword
Like kids who screamed bombs away
Not comprehending that things
Abide longer than bodies
Try to bring order to horror
Bite off pieces, really small ones
Carpenter bees chew up fences
Bombs can weigh thirty thousand pounds
Yes, I’d prefer something tuneful
My life clothed in sheer poesy
Instead, we talk money and boats
Who mightn’t summit in the end
These poems belong to a numbered sequence entitled Four Seven Eight.
Jan Clausen’s poetry titles include Duration (Hanging Loose), If You Like Difficulty (Harbor Mountain), and Veiled Spill: A Sequence (GenPop). She has published two novels, a story collection, and the memoir Apples and Oranges (Seven Stories). She recently completed My Great Acceleration, a memoir of personal and familial connection to the crimes of US empire. Her poems and creative prose have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, most recently Action, Spectacle; Fence; Firmament; Makhzin; Massachusetts Review; Mercury Firs; and Tupelo Quarterly. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she has lived in Brooklyn, New York since the 1970s.