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EDITORIAL
ARCHIVE
LAGNIAPPE
MAST
SUBMISSIONS |
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Two
Poems
by Stefi
Weisburd
Earth,
On Loan to Another Institution
Spinewart. Windhound
terrifying rabbit leaves, this
gust feels up window seals
and snot-colored sky before
a tornado lets down
its pants. I've never
hidden in a closet from
a howling but
in L.A. I've felt
the earth heave
and settle like a luxury
liner, felt the reverb of Earth's
machinations, its little
demigod continents spreading
the legs of oceans as if
upwelling were love. Life
without sunlight
survives, even scorched
by our lack
of understanding & stinking
of sulfur. Sea night
holds a pencil
in its teeth, eraser
wiping out the theory of
light. Nevertheless,
look at us trying
to explain the iron
gizmo of our planet. Humans
are a crustal nuisance,
itching up
the repose of sediments;
we're oil leeches,
desecrating shale, setting
barns on fire in prairies. Such
wreckage makes us Mars bait
for sure, makes us fold
inward to study
the galaxy's plexus
from the inside, always
this habit of
extrapolating from fixed
points, emoting
probes into outthere
in search of our DNA's
echo. We're no quickfish
of kindness, taking core
samples like bone marrow
from Antarctica, upending
microbe nests in icebergs. Our
words bark off
the neodymium page & rattle
like pockets full
of bullets. No
wonder the lion's
share of biomass throws
its petroleum cocktail
parties where it all
began, in rock, miles
under ground,
where sightings
of our mosquito
velocities are merely
the long toxic reveries
of oxygen, unbound.
Field Trip To A Dangerous Mind
Bradbury Science Museum, Los Alamos, NM, home of the atomic bomb
Mr. X's brain resembles a mushroom cloud in a jar. Just now it's unjarred
and pinkish, skulking on its tray. The fifth graders in the Science
Theater
masticate this tidbit of data while surveying the weather in their
stomachs.
Mr X's brain donated itself to the museum in 1987, says Ms. Fermi,
educational consultant. Now that the brain's unclassified, she can
divulge
that Mr. X was a cold war sales rep.
Mr. X's spinal cord resembles a ponytail of long pink spaghetti. Ms.
Fermi
lifts his eyeballs with a popsicle stick.
One by one the children hold Mr. X's brain. Not realizing it's a dud,
some
kids faint in a chain reaction. Others think it's yet another memo
from the
Office of Cooties Management.
Simultaneously, with Dillon C's hands coddling his cerebellum, Mr.
X
misplaces the atomic formula for ________.
Ms. Fermi warns that smooth brains are too big for their skulls and
may fall
for optical tricks as Sarah S. soon discovers for herself when her
worksheet
morphs into a five ton Fat Man.
Ms Fermi leaves the class with this thought: Women have more daisy
chains
linking left to right hemis. The women chaperons smug. Who knows what
will
happen when the two halves touch - light! or annihilation!
Stefi Weisburd received The Nation/"Discovery"
prize for poetry in 2002. Her poems have been recently been placed in
Poetry, The
Gettysburg Review, The
Iowa Review, The
Paris Review, Poetry
Daily and The Threepenny Review and she has a poetry collection
for children is forthcoming from Wordsong. |