POST- (an excerpt)
One hand beat
At a guttering softening bellying eddying
Bank of white dust
Swift
Spreading coils
Our men and
The source of our decadence — all of deep space — extracted
At last to a
Wilderness
When I
Sat by the brightness / slew by the brightness / I slew
The last curate whose wailing
Possessed me. Useless and cumbersome
Empire
or
Bouquets of fire
My nerve
Rattled through me
Behind it
Was land — behind that was the Zone
The trees were scarred too
They were washing the streets with white powder
–Look–
Smoke pouring into the universe
The rose-colored foot
Of the Martian
Fell / like a garment a / grotesque mingling / my / wife’s face white
but a ruin / the sodden / man between longing
*
Not simply torn between longing and safety
But torn
Somewhere below the great Mother of Cities
Here it’s the same
And the atom is everywhere
*
What stood in our yard were like demons
outside of time. One had a rock in his mouth,
another a tree branch
And “each man became what he was”
We gave our meat to the meat plant
& the garden, town, village
Lifted from the mind
*
From above we saw:
A ruined shape
We turned to [colorless]
The sea was like the sky a long, long chain that tethered everything
At last, at last
To hunger and terror
Salami and buckwheat
We’ll stand between death and its shining ideals
We’ll fatten from hunger and light the whole earth
With our comrades’ debris
We’ll be grim set on living
We’ll bury the headquarters schools and the baths
And the water main
Oh strange person
Oh person in a vacuum
We with our canons and spaceships were children
Man is simply frightening
(Instead of fields) the forest rises again
The lines of POST- are pulled from/ inspired by/ reconstituted from: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, by Svetlana Alexievich and War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells.
Laura Sims is the author of three books of poems: My god is this a man (forthcoming, Fence Books 2013), Stranger (Fence Books, 2009), and Practice, Restraint, (winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize). She is a co-editor of Instance Press and lives in Brooklyn.