Selected by Dawn Lundy Martin as a finalist in Omnidawn’s 2019 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize
from EJECT
First, we electrified the night
Using a recipe for a warm egg near a blue square
Sometimes my life isn’t funny
I don’t know the source of joy, just when it’s there
Microplastic is falling from the air, smothering cities with several tons of tiny fibers
On average, five bits of plastic in every glass of tap
Where it comes from is a mystery
This research only scratches the surface, but it seems to be a very itchy one, the scientist said
Your couch is very pretty
There are many interesting ways a person can die
I didn’t need to know what Disney princesses would look like if they were fat
I think I’m forgetting how to think
Or thinking like a machine would
Like, just give me a 2nd to think
It sounds the same to a machine
I miss my original rhythms
A prepper said, well this is weird, before inflating a condom with his mouth
I’ve slept with many nice people
The respondability of this poem as an email is rated zero out of seven
When I read the news I like the writing to be invisible, so I can go directly to the information
The prepper put the condom on his foot and said, this can be used to protect your feet in a SHTF situation
When someone said smoke, I imagined the city in cinders
0 is the only number that looks exactly like a letter
You even can pronounce it oh on the phone like I do
Yes, I have seen the slideshow of the suicide camps, where you go to the trees and go through the motions to rid it from the body
The man on the train kept insisting: a prune was once a single plum; a raisin a single grape. You hear what I’m saying, he asked?
I thought, perfect correspondence
It’s obvious, the golden fleece will shed a million fibers in the wash
Use the sun to take the liquid out of flesh to make it small
To make it very very small
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I am trying to cultivate the feeling of being my-own-witness
But this planet will be forgotten
I am done with nostalgia, the human said, but what shall I put in its place?
The other asked, would you do it all again?
A pause: of course implies matter of course implies automation
So no, I could not bear the preternatural earth
A series of rooms abutting rooms abutting lesser oceans
All else contained in my interior sea
So we speak through a machine, unsure of what it is we want
Algorithms in a second floor tea shop of the old world’s erstwhile seat
A leaping at; a flashing by and gone
I watch the hot plates of the laminator seal each word
The affirmative names of other planets
The gloves I wore or that wore me, hands jammed into a different hologram
I didn’t come here not to find you
The earth’s last snow gridding the air
Beyond, a pulse of coursing blankness
The damp behind each original
A human calling me forward and into the unfruited future
All the chokeberries gone a green-white of beforeness
The storm a program ticking
My vine gone taut with ripe need, a menu of desire
A final need to touch the untouched places
The pathway painted by ancestry, a set of stairs at dawn, completely pink
The paint found in the basement
The man of me sinking beneath the waves in a rigid position
The worm of me wearing so many jackets
I must be something else
For you I have a dry bouquet
And then the rising sea, a private threshold, a doom that walks on stilts
A certainty of coming weather
And the beach of both of us, an actor in the closet
The lake, an ancient entrapment
On its shores, a baby smeared with nut butter to suffer the wood tick
In a cool forest, the wooden remains of a boat
In a bucket a gather of long-legged bullfrogs
Or basket of lamb’s ear, picked to be eaten
A crabapple pie and a stripping behind the old juniper
The roses rimming the perimeter
A grid to plan the garden
It was the threshing of wheat that spelled Facetime
An accident in red, composure of floral and terror
Either a fool for this or that
A dinner bought, a hankering for plastic
A species adapting to imminent shifts by eating their young
A fabric for circumstance
The young making speeches with silence
That tipping of one’s countenance to indicate availability in the denouement
Or constant cracking and emittance of the whoa
This bad amalgamation of acoustics
Yes, a temporal faltering
Where the man set himself afire on the common lawn of Brooklyn, a permanent divot
A shallow impression repeatedly filling with flowers
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Tracy Fuad is a poet and artist from Minnesota. Her debut collection of poetry, about:blank, was chosen by Claudia Rankine as the winner of the 2020 Donald Hall Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook PITH (Newfound, 2020) and the art book DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD (TxtBooks, 2019). She is a graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and will be in residence at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center in 2021. She currently lives in Berlin.