by Jeff Latosik
I’ve also felt the end there ribboned in it like a muscle.
Whenever I’ve seen the money I’ve spent and tried
not spending I’ve been pelted with the thought
of it travelling at the fastest speed we’ve measured.
Whenever it rains days on me or it dries up
and somebody’s beautiful commencement speech just will not end,
I picture all that rain again and I can begin to smile.
Whenever I’ve heard reality’s only just so there,
the tracks don’t meet, a body’s mostly just a host,
I lean back in my chair and a breeze enhances what I’m feeling.
Whenever I see the ones who left me holding the hundred-dollar flowers,
with their houses and their kids all flying by me single file
I can see the storms unpacking like machines off in the distance.
Whenever I’m braced against the quicksand or the ocean
or the audit, ready to tae-bo alligators if it all defies my druthers,
I can hold myself up with all the lifelines I no longer have
and say, without any sadness, none of my dream homes wanted me.
GROWTH
The o in it lasts for the time in a blink
but it’s tied off with a clean shovel tap
of consonant as if something there might
swallow up all time and sense. Growth.
Fish blink off in a river that was once
a lake that was once an ocean.
They are slow fireworks for no holiday,
more gone for being captured in a GIF.
Meanwhile, my hand’s locked
on Channel Everything so that I forget
that it’s my index finger scrolling.
My own hand’s the thing I’m battling.
And so whatever lumps appear I disclose;
whatever minute specs awake like animated
full stops and float in grout I dutifully
try to trap and kill. Twin currents—
to grow and to stop growth
and still the word seems to open up
a space around which all manner
of straight and crooked thing must be erected.
I picture a river around which leaves
have framed a view you might write home about
but you don’t because that would letter out a state
it’s put you in, a happiness.
Lost so easily it’s as if it wasn’t owned,
not growth but the moment before
the saying. The city I used to live in has grown.
In the ruined factories, there are weddings.
It was all Ojibwa land once and before that,
the slowest curtain of a glaciation.
I have a daughter I don’t have
with not a resolution but a blankness
for a face or rather a face that changes.
She doesn’t grow or I grow around her
and she visits all the more.
Peace is what I tell her blankness is.
What she knows is what rearranges
itself for a reason I can’t seem to guess.
Growth. There’s something it’s all spinning
on that can’t be said. Or if it can
it will be right by accident the way Epicurus
was about atoms swerving in the void—
the quantum in a coconut shell.
Down it drops or up life pokes its baleful
tortoise head from it someone should say
and if they haven’t then I’ll say it.
Once, in Bangkok a tuk-tuk driver stopped in mid-day traffic
and knew the locus points and fissures necessary
to crack a coconut I’d purchased with one tap.
He was gone before he’d heard my thanks.
Inside, the water was so cold that I still
think about it when I hold my finger
under a faucet, feeling for a sensation
I’m not sure I’d know I’ve got.
And then in a cab on Peter St. the driver motioned
to a screen on his back-seat headrest
and I tapped my card like I was never
even really there. Beyond that the only thing
exchanged was pleasantries. Don’t worry,
tech support will tether us back to all
that can be billed if not leaned on well.
But there’s forever an addendum here: error
is the loam from which layoff, retraction, bust
and frustration bloom. And us.
CUBEWANO
—Pronounced “Cube-wawn-oh,” a nickname for QB1, the first trans-Neptunian object discovered in the Kuiper belt
When David Jewitt looked into his lens
on Mauna Kea one night in 1992 he saw it—
lone outlier, as if from a game
that had been packed up and long won
and what remained was just this lone Hail Mary
that never really got squared.
Not among the sleek and smooth-seeming
entourages of moons and planets;
unconcerned with the inside politics of orbit.
It sped by in what we can’t now call
only just the empty dark.
I wonder if he saw the smashed abacus
of light and blinked away a simple math.
Maybe he asked if moving forward really just meant
staying put to see what’s only ever been present
in a kind of not-plain view. Last night I spent hours looking
at the little needle moving on my screen
predicting which way the vote or the weather would go.
I thought: I never would have guessed
I’d love someone who couldn’t fall apart
in a FreshCo beside the many gluten-free cakes.
And about ten years, I’d add, since I sat down
and wrote my first what I would call
(because I lived all that time that happened after) poem.
THE NATURAL
So Yaadi Tremen pitched half a season
and was out with plantar fasciitis.
It wasn’t fair but then there was the talent,
which is what Dr. Rory Keane who performed
the release procedure had in spades.
He poked around the heel spur
with its bird beak and its cresting wave
and even managed to daydream himself
carving a shorey break in Biarritz or Shonan.
Meanwhile, Rory Keane Jr. (who couldn’t tell
blade from whisk) was slowly accepting the idea
that he wouldn’t be the governor of Maine
much less the mayor of Newton,
a bell curve of fence slats that, should he be stoned,
expanded like the rib cage of a humpback
as he drove home avoiding all lit roads.
He’d say, You’d do the same but not to anyone,
much less his father who lived his life
in a percentile Rory Jr. thought of as a kind of summit.
Hence, the trip to Mount Katahdin
on which Thoreau stood atop in 1846
wanting to see the soul of nature and then
said, This was that Earth of which we have heard,
made out of Chaos and Old Night.
Quite exact, despite when you think of how
a doctor can elongate a calf muscle
quietly without breaking much of a sweat.
Or how Tremen once threw 100 mph
with a chest cold that had sapped him
almost to the point where he would say
the natural is too expensive.
When we think of the place we’re meant to be,
doesn’t it all seem to unfold so effortlessly?
Which doesn’t get Rory Jr. coming back
and thinking to himself that he’s avoided lit roads all
his life—
and like that he’s skidding on some ice.
When he recovers, it will go unseen,
giving him the time to sit and stare into the darkness
once again but this time think, A chimera almost killed me.
POP ROCKS
We had this game. You stood and shook them into your mouth.
Then, Coke. Then pain.
If we could, we counted, One, two.
And then we spit when it was too much.
You wouldn’t have known the city then.
It had this narrow, empty horizon.
The buildings now are architecturally twisted
like they’re being half-nelsoned for cash.
You did it again. Three, four. The circle grew
and grew and took more in as we learned
cell life started. Mack Johnson held it in for
five minutes. Then he promptly, silently left.
The city in exploded view. Cranes, more cranes,
two bedrooms, three. Skyline almost fizzing
like those long holds where the spit was blue.
I have no deeper story to tell:
There’s an opposite to singing.
CLEAR GIANT
Imagine you do something small….So if I forge a cheque…minor offence…and in the process of arresting and convicting me maybe the courts do a brain scan and they determine that actually she has a predilection for far more serious crimes….She hasn’t done any of those things yet she could commit a violent crime…if all you’re worried about is what she might do, then you can keep her in prison forever.
—Nita Farahany and Jad Abumrad, “Forget about Blame?” episode, Radiolab
Here—not prison. Not really the occupancy
professionals state. Just a clear giant,
an optical cloak of steel and glass keeping us.
We live here, they say. We say it, too.
Except some days we’re more, It really just is.
So we do the things we would have done:
water the hostas, mend a torn latch.
And on evenings when our zone plays
slow pitch long into dusk, then we field.
We love one another until it’s too much
and Jerry or Avi’s out sprinting again
beyond the gate, reaching for the clear giant.
How long has it been? I never wasn’t.
A machine just glided over me like the angels in our books.
Some nights they show a PSA. Once, an aerial shot
of the brain could explain away a case or two.
But when we dropped down to city level
via fMRI and then GN3Q a tiny bit of fluff
or damage became the devil in the details.
What to do? Some nights I just sit and look
at my hands. In some whirring vector machine,
I’m dinging red, a cloud of killer I can’t diffuse.
It’s not human to not see the walls, Avi says
and sprints again. Or it is. Some nights I take my walks out
as far as I can go without the thought of returning
to my notches on a lone tree counting all of the years.
A room with no chairs and a view of a town
appears like a beacon whenever I close my eyes.
THE REPLAY REVIEW
It was a new challenge about the place
one thing ended and another began.
In the stands we watched and then
rained tall cans down from the blue
as if forever was just a vendor.
It was about a line in the sand
somebody had up and called blue ribbon.
A supposed given that was more a command
so there was a tribunal and then a long deliberation.
There was a common conclusion once.
Then a bunch of crummy pamphlets.
It was a beaut in one kind of way.
A territorial dispute of whether the fence-post
was foul or fair in a deafening boo.
It was everything peer-reviewed
up in the air set to blaring country
music and each citizen elbow-deep
in their data plan and their to-dos.
It was waiting. It was hard.
It was discovering that our camera-flipped
phones when turned to each other
created a kind of infinity mirror
making the whole scene more fun house
than a place you’d ever want to keep score
of anything true. It was a hunch that reality,
never more tricky, kept moving quietly
in and out of view as if stuck on one of those terrible
hot dog carousels. It was being so lost
in the inside baseball and the legalese
we couldn’t tell the storms from the breeze
and couldn’t freeze the bobbleheads
some other team, and then our team,
were becoming. Man, it was really bumming
me out. I was in the nosebleeds
wondering if I might just up and blow away.
I was watching all of us hovering there.
It was all hovering. A kind of slow flash
and it moved like knees do when the jury,
the crew chief, the judge, the worry of doctors
and the sea of committees are taking their sweet time.
It was arguing about that initial challenge
or at what point the call had been made.
No tape on that, though. All the times
I gave up on the final one I came back less afraid.
HIDDEN POCKETS IN PARKAS
Sometimes I like to sit and slide
my hand into one. The Sub Zero line can feel
like an alpine summit in itself.
The padding is called Thermaflex
which is really eiderdown in the way
that an impression of Christopher Walken
is the man who once played Frank Abagnale.
It’s no big glitch to just start losing track
of what’s really apparent—
but let’s say that the lightest twitch
makes a tear in the warp and woof
a salesman swore on his own brother
was foolproof. And so suddenly I’m cut loose
from the lining that was meant to shield me
from whether I was really in the Eaton Centre.
I wasn’t. I was walking through a field
somewhere in Hindu Kush.
I was kneading a tiny hit of hash
and combing a helmet into my head.
A sky chewed up by Chinook blade.
My smartphone was rifle butt.
And so many hidden pockets I couldn’t
remember where I’d put the most identifying
of my documents: a letter from my stepmother.
THE GOOD
Oh, floating good of just above eye level, of non-blinding rays,
a bit taller still than anyone who bristles
at attention for the anthem or the silence—
let me remember the many Japanese women
who filled their breasts with silicone to please American recruits.
Many of them died, oh good of the high up in a tree
with no branches for the first ten feet then boom
it all comes flailing its arms for help.
There’s an ever-shifting line we live by trying to walk
holding all the mismatched things we’ve sworn are not.
They won’t settle because we’re each other’s answers
but we’re separate. Yesterday, an officer wouldn’t
acknowledge my reports that someone by the slide
was deep in trouble, and when I looked back, dear good
of the hundred hatha poses on a single ankle,
he became a tree himself, which is to say he left.
Sometimes you run away or stay
too long,
have to live the hundredth day wiping gravy from the platter.
Sometimes you hang around kite level, unable to be pulled in
well enough or winds will whip you higher
than a human eye can see. Otherwise, you’re not unlike
a favourite band touring Cleveland for one night
but all the flights there are being diverted
or delayed. I wish I knew you better
on those days when it seems the leaves are just these bad
magician hanky tricks. We have to postulate a fiction.
I could follow what is real down to its furnaces.
But I do see you out somewhere that Google Maps won’t
guess the driving time to accurately. Somebody’s limbs
are being switched off like lights in a room that’s being left.
It’s almost empty now except the last light whose glare
has now turned to soft candle glow at night. You’re there.
THE CONNECTOME
When they laid the neurolink down on me softly
implanting the plugs of everything into
my late stage of limbic thinning
all knowledge moved through me as breath might move
in a napper. Some smell to a crocus, true,
but no crocuses seeming the slowest applause.
No caring that they had an ache-smell
that welled itself downwards, were more smell
than anything. When they peeled the server farm
off me as if it were clothes long drenched
in a storm that had lain itself down,
exhausted, I slept.
This one shored up memory
of Kyle Wallace in grade 3
aiming his air rifle at me one Sunday
and then whispering, Bang. I woke up to that.
I reached out through eons of air
and tried to fasten his childhood back on him
like ice that had fallen
from a high Artic shelf.
I can know property, degree, and position,
