Our poetry editor, Joe Pan, has selected a poem by Brendan Lorber for his monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
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A detail of Alex Da Corte’s Die Hexe installation at Luxembourg & Dayan (photo by Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)
See that? That’s what’ll replace us
The medium for an underachieving
Cartesian heart that western civ’s
left no option beyond Intentionality
reduced to a pastoral canal’s Gowanus
moonshine on the surface tension
between us and the dismantled
biology beneath It’s as if something
smashed the shiver from our timbers
or at least our face into a thousand pieces
to be reassembled on the other side
A test run for the planet to get through
the membrane of courtly love bounded
by bed and breakfast or by empiric
and rational Not all experiments work
as when Spinoza and Leibniz balled
out of the Monad or Reagan answered
questions under the helicopter rotors
he could pretend were deafening
Once the pieces break enough
they behave like liquid as though
demolition might be the answer to thirst
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Brendan Lorber is a poet, essayist, and editor. He’s the author, most recently, of Unfixed Elegy, a chapbook from Buttered Lamb Press. Since 1995 he has published and edited Lungfull! Magazine, an annual anthology of contemporary literature which prints the rough drafts of contributors’ work in addition to the final version, in order to reveal the creative process. He lives atop the tallest hill in Brooklyn, New York in a little castle across the street from a 500-acre necropolis.
