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# "The New Water" by Brendan Lorber
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/the-new-water-by-brendan-lorber/
- Published: 2015-03-12T18:22:38.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:43:32.000Z
- Description: 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.
- Author: Joe Pan
- Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:08 (2014, 2015, part 2)

*Our poetry editor, Joe Pan, has selected a poem by Brendan Lorber for [his monthly series](http://hyperallergic.com/tag/hyperallergic-poetry/) that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.*

\* \* \*

![A detail of Alex Da Corte's  Die Hexe installation at Luxembourg & Dayan (photo by Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/02/alex-da-corte-1280.jpg)

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.*