2 poems
LANDSCAPE WITH WHIRLPOOLS
For a while, I speak in sentences.
I catch my breath
long enough to form structured images:
The eye, lacking a serial number.
A white-washed tree, a symbol of radical unity.
A body held by psychic ropes
against brevity and entropy.
A thistle,
its spiky flowers drinking
the poison air
and flaring up in acid
laughter. The children
pop off its head.
I take away the camera.
+
Poets now use simple words, like river, litter, tree.
Rituals honor the living
while we are alive.
What we see as true, we cannot see
how it is true. Real things are messy.
The arm, lacking a life raft.
A white-washed curtain for a horizon.
On the timeline,
a generation doesn’t connect
9/11 to any specific memory.
A cut is art.
An economy transforms its own wound.
Who has access to you?
Are you using all of your resources?
+
The closer we are to realizing our efforts,
the stronger fantasy’s lure.
Unrealistic women
play real women
in scripted dramas:
Opaque
shower door glass.
Animated missiles
yellow as Daffy Duck’s feet.
A man drinks alone with his projections.
Don’t embarrass yourself with satire.
Claws have a life of their own.
+
I think
we’re jealous of wolves
because we’ll never be at home in our hour.
A plastic cap
topping a bottleneck
is not virtue.
A wounded yet
radiant pain
like the sprouting of grape vines
and oil tankers.
Civilization begins
with the first broken bone.
How does it want you to remember it?
What is it asking you to allow?
+
Like me,
a yellow buttercup
sleeps through the great gap of time.
A crocus
discloses its information
not so I can identify it, but so
that it can enter a contract.
Prolific weeds
I can never domesticate.
I approach them as I would
a sacred landmark.
With great ambition.
With a bone
healed true to its voice.
+
Listen: The world
rose from nothing.
The potential you see in others is yours.
A white maw thaw, symbol of ambient spring.
Paper shredded with such precision
that I can feel its hemorrhage
of bonds returning as fruit.
Anyone who’s ever struggled
docks at this harbor.
I spend an afternoon
searching for vacant lots
and cheap land on eBay.
I become a stranger
to protect what I love.
SPRING SUN
The weird stories. Some of which are true
or true as legend. They burn exceptionally well.
At jury duty, I sit between a man,
a doctor who lies
about his profession,
and a woman
who’s just discovered she has seven siblings.
Somewhere on my timeline,
I make a commitment to being understood.
Why can’t we just live here,
we own it?
A woman beside the doctor
tells us she’s psychic,
saw us in her dream the night before. I saw her
outside the courthouse,
watched her park illegally at the curb.
I’m astonished by her
desire to be seen.
The doctor says,
I’m an orchid whisperer.
Grows lilies in his basement.
His bulbs sprout in bags,
need neither water nor light
and I remember my dream, my friend and I
pacing the corridors of
a brutalist dam.
I never wanted to learn to testify.
Hands are a means of amplification.
I swear
Itching, kneading, touching our face.
Spring allergies are here.
And performative violence
as an instruction.
Now visible in a real way,
like a sundae.
Pollen, a Trojan horse.
First the sniffles, then the kingdom.
Jasmine Dreame Wagner is the author of On a Clear Day (Ahsahta Press), a collection of lyric essays and poems deemed “a capacious book of traveller’s observations, cultural criticism, and quarter-life-crisis notes” by Stephanie Burt at The New Yorker and “a radical cultural anthropology of the wild time we’re living in” by Iris Cushing at Hyperallergic. Wagner's work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Beloit Poetry Journal, BOMB Magazine, Colorado Review, Fence, Guernica, Hyperallergic, Indiana Review, New American Writing, Verse, and in three anthologies: The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press), Lost and Found: Stories From New York (Mr. Beller's Neighborhood Books), and We Like It Fast: Writing Prompts and Model Stories from the Editors and Contributors of NANO Fiction (NANO Fiction). In 2019, Wagner was awarded a WPR Creative Grant from Harvard University to create new sound and broadcast works drawing from the Woodberry Poetry Room's audio archives.