i mean most milk happens in galaxies
beautiful moon I love you!
mysterious longing I carve my forked name into your lashes!
sweeping despondency I drive amid your paisley throb!
laryngitis I sew a line of yarn across your bread!
our failures of imagination are failures of justice
sweet-tooth as syntax build a commons, frontiers squealing surplus
it’s my nature to become unsure
we live like everyone else but like one isn’t supposed to live
no more involuntary art
no more waking up spatula in hand to walk down down down down down down down
sweet prurience I glue things to driftwood in the warmth of your distraction!
dislocation I streak my eyes with cinnabar!
counterpoint I tarry in the microphone’s filth!
delusion you seem rich I mean you live like a very rich person!
revolt against the continuity of curves
a successful emotional niche requires appropriate intensity calibration
all scary, no spice. all aga, no memnon
reverie clicks its tongue: a particular indecision, a beachball, a wrench
oh please come away with me we can shed all parts of speech
while vowels slow-melt back into the walls of the pyramid
jeremiah
I am in ancient
egypt with the prophet
Jeremiah. is it weird
I ask to be a prophet?
no it just means they
haven’t burned what
you wrote he says
I came from a
lineage of priests in
a small northern
town, we had a
sacred mailbox, all
the sheep of
happiness everything
we moved to the city
which is awful got
work as priests an
impossible situation we’d
be reading the most
beautiful ancient shit
that to be in any world
is also an exile our songs the
sleeping of bridges all this
super beautiful shit
while they slit screaming
goats’ necks thru the
window divine right
of goat’s blood everywhere
and then bastards came
the incoherence in their
teeth an ache that
only dominion could fill
so we fled here to
the birthplace of
difference, to make
cities of ourselves,
a tiny temple wherever
any two words meet
what would you do all
day? I’d write he says
or talk out loud for my
friends to write down, I
mastered the law of
phantomed bodies, learned
to unspool whatever
tongues knew
I cast red fabric from
the library windows &
tried to make an intimacy
between my memory
and the memory of
the world only it turns
out worlds don’t remember
a goddamn thing
poetry is hard work! I
say & he’s like yeah poetry
is hard work
what did you write? I
ask, o what does
it matter? I sided with
kings, priests, teachers, I
picked allies &
causes in rooms I
dreamt a deep sleep of
pure listening &
carried back what
I could, none of this
makes sense now, here, I
am a different person
you sound depressed I say
not really he tells me I
worked the braids of
circumstance as best
I could the air & how
to fill it I lived a life of
art & besides someone had
to do something, us
just living there in
the desert so much
past & so little history
Ian Dreiblatt’s translation of Dmitrii Furman’s Spiral is forthcoming from Verso Books. His poetry collection forget thee is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. He’s TV Commercials Correspondent at the Believer and lives in Brooklyn, where he talks to people about their dogs.