CHRONOS
for Ish Klein
1
We grade stories
and we reconcile accounts.
By night we binge
on The Walking Dead.
2
"An actual electron
emits and swallows
its own photons
now and then."
3
Confusing exchange
with use value
makes the word "own"
a hot mess.
4
When I'm alone
I pose
my question:
Why is one
constant
always squared?
SOME BODY
1
When I first lie down, trying to sleep, there's a lump of dread and hurt in my midsection. When did this thing form? Was it always there? I remember being young - that is, I remember places I lived and some of the things I did. I lived in an expensive, unheated apartment in
San Francisco
and sat around with my poet friends at readings and in bars. I had written maybe 20 poems. I thought I was near the center of something and could aim to embody it. That's enough to get a person going.
2
Vines pegged to stakes:
veins over bones,
the beginning
or end of
somebody.
*
Weed tops turned
white frizz up,
blow off, get
carried away.
*
But the uncertainty
in her eyes,
the hesitant steps
as if she were making
some mistake
AUDIENCE
1
Phlegmatic and unbending,
Russell Crowe as Noah
teaches us
to hold the door
against “the desperate”
and “the many”
threatened by catastrophic
climate change –
worse than we’d guessed
and more immediate.
2
Are we stowaways?
3
Zipper fracture
involves simultaneous
stimulation of parallel
horizontal wells.
Viscoelastic
surfactant gel
has/has not been
adequately described
RNA WORLD
1
The numbers speak for themselves.
"To repeat is to recognize."
"Do you copy?"
2
Here's one way to tell it.
Having arisen
unobserved,
you monitor
your thoughts
and varying
levels of discomfort,
then file a report -
now just a memory,
one eclipsing the last
and you
aren't even tired.
Or are you?
You grow another you -
a down-home,
come-from-nothing
sort
whom you project
to cover your
[NOTE. Rae Armantrout’s newest book, Itself, will be published in 2015 by Wesleyan University Press. She has emerged in recent years as an essential contributor to a new & evolving American poetry, the force of the work in fulfillment of Lydia Davis’s earlier assessment: “In every line, every stanza of these brief and dense poems, Rae Armantrout’s powerful mix of scientific inquiry and social commentary, wit and strangeness, is profoundly stimulating. She changes the way one sees the world and hears language—every poem an explosion on the page in which her individuality shines through. Is the work funny? Absolutely. Moving? Yes. But beware—after reading Armantrout you will question everything, including what it means to be ‘funny’ and ‘moving.’” Previous postings on Poems & Poetics can be found here& here, as well as Marjorie Perloff’s essay“An Afterword for Rae Armantrout.” (J.R.)