Wendy Xu
Cats
Let me ruin it for you in saying
When bolts snap on your spine’s taser
Poetry pools in the outer, more angelic plume,
Material numeral’s fluid firewall.
A gust juliennes my cats
Leaving two fur chandeliers
Lit by future movements, sun’s installed
And socket-shaken glare
Beating from bone’s mirror as thought
Enters and exits its dock.
Their fresh event now whirs to that limit
Around the room, twin atlas volumes
Read like flip books whose vile jelly
Windows into paper guts—
We see through them but they’re still there, I’m
Sure as frost fakes your words
In other of Earth’s clawed curtains.
At what hour should we call it night?
Pointing north and south, a reassembled freedom,
Poetry’s architectural history grows
Fungal on the number one. I’d love to go
Down facing stars, such mud.
The gathering environment told my
Contagion that these were friends.
Ecstatic Zero
I’m totally not you, but figuring this illness can’t be eradicated
While certain ones do veer off their blackened boughs,
How far does the ripple reach when seeds roll down a septic
System? Liquids exist but not
A fluid world. Still each lack, maybe a grave,
Clots this paradise stinking from our evidence
Into a honking syllable’s bill, mass snapped up from Narcissus’s
Second surface. Nothing’s a clone and
Your descent through that choral throat says
You’ve already encountered the first fungus, a duplicate life.
As your pupil slips into its keyhole you release a little cough
And in the ill-lit room beyond the door an empty suit
Turns its head, information and defense spilling from its pit
In the shitty willow’s boundless shadow.
* * *
Daniel Poppick is the author of The Police (Omnidawn, forthcoming in 2017) and Vox Squad (Petri Press, 2014). His poems appear in BOMB, The New Republic, Granta, The Volta, and Fence. He currently teaches writing at Parsons and co-edits the Catenary Press with Rob Schlegel and Rawaan Alkhatib. He lives in Brooklyn.
