I believe in science and also
Who gets closer the further they get? Everyone believes in science and also
why time calls itself a spell The magic of returning to morning consciousness
is that we do when the reason we do is super unavailable until much later
and is often the answer a spider trapped in larger spider’s web didn’t really want
Time doesn’t move on it moves in and is all grab me a drink from the kitchen
while you’re up To crack open a life into chapters or the longer chapters
into separate lives with no guarantee we’ll make it anything but cracked
seems like a lot of blowing kisses so long on the red carpet skyway we almost
miss our flight from some erudite and charmingly flawed idea of partnership
if we’re that sort of a bright eight-eyed person But to fall into place the place
must first fall apart Or at least fall down to get up Everyone I loved
who died must be together on a red carpet or at the hem of an even
more resplendent web for it to make sense weaving a tutorial in fractions
and responsibility towards my own half-smile shared through them with you
How old would you say I am?
It’s never right to implicate permanence in the chaos of an unruly moment
when called upon to guess someone’s age the correct answer does nothing
but filter an idea like young oafhood through the paleolithic flannels
of my partly departed My first years were real but I wasn’t which is why
they were so vivid until I found myself more real than the years
that have become insulting or absurd in their lack of interest for what’s
being described as they go from moving mountains to moving furniture
in the living room upstairs while I glare at the ceiling wishing they could see
the expression on my face Next year’s birthday looks back at this one with
a tenderness that says time is whatever you can take or leave like a bath
or a message bottled to wash up later on a beach that tries and fails to
preserve a gap in each of the years a little invisible room for special
events visible only after the fact through the flared optics of an optimism
that hasn’t recognized itself yet as the retroactive reason to keep on going
My friends are beautiful but inscrutable
My friends are beautiful but inscrutable a kind of charming
walkable downtown at war with the economic conclusions
that gave rise to its own mercantile wanderings The migration
of our exteriorities from a shared space through the quarantine
dreams of a battered sabbatical pairs well with our tenderest organs’
journey to the outside A quick flight through the permanent volta
that replaced the personal is political with the internal is public
dissected by the knife-sharp air that draws us into one another
I’ve been setting my clock forward every spring hoping to get ahead
of things enough to verify what time will tell because you can’t
trust much of what time says about the inevitable forensics of a skull
that keeps on with the grin long after it’s done taking life for a spin
I grabbed a slice on St Marks to avoid the same mistake the day made
filling with itself until it was more night than night ever dreamt of
Your gaze strikes the side of my selfie and I exist
Your gaze strikes the side of my selfie and I exist if only
in the loopy heroism where the truth is always corny
but must be subverted to endure like an easter egg someone
thought to hide from us in the hopes that we would find it
and be grateful for the effort they required to discover the
tumble dry pleasure of every complexity’s simple everyday parts
Let’s nestle in the familiar comfort of daily bad news suspended
weightless over this-again cliffs or at the table with coffee
in a meme-addled firestorm angling for possibilities beyond
just another world where even if our insouciance is a private
idiom of fear we can still pervert the mounting evidence
of our gloomy epilogue into something filthy as the off balance
glamour of our art and friendship is always crunching up the tree-
lined driveway towards the heavy elation of our heavenly stations
Brendan Lorber is a writer, visual artist, and teacher. He is the author of If this is paradise why are we still driving? (subpress, 2018) and several chapbooks, most recently Unfixed Elegy and Other Poems. Since 1995 he has edited Lungfull! Magazine, currently in hibernation, an annual anthology of contemporary literature that prints the rough draft of contributors’ work in addition to the final version in order to reveal the creative process. He’s also edited The Poetry Project Newsletter, and curated both the Zinc Bar Reading Series and the Segue Foundation Reading Series. His visual art is in The Museum of Modern Art, The Free Black Women’s Library, Opus 40 Gallery, Artists Space, The Free Library of Philadelphia, The Woodland Pattern Center, The Scottish Poetry Library, and in private collections. He teaches fantasy cartography through Uncommon Goods. He lives in a little observatory in a Brooklyn neighborhood that nobody can quite find on a map.
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Heavy Feather Review 