four short poems
Word count: 174
Paragraphs: 8
Delete the Mobile
I am ready to lean on volcanic activity
for the weary travel consultant Westerner.
Inside her instability is a bonus—
a potential wormhole to the war wounds.
We’ve been cross folding Nirvana.
It’s civilization we hunt to. A phone
was coming too, this is the immunity we love.
Social Observations
For once I don’t need to inhabit
or to appropriate the life;
I need to understand why my
Experience hastens the denials
& what hope there is in a vacuum.
Passages
summer ends again.
I do your bidding & you do mine.
the flashes run deep but invisible, &
we are part of the national callous,
standing on a hill & swearing.
Poem
“I don’t understand why you
make the decisions you make.”
If he said that in 50 years
it would be completely different.
That’s my idea of something beautiful.
Edmund Berrigan is the author of More Gone (City Lights, 2019). He is co-editor with Anselm Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Nick Sturm of Get the Money (Collected Prose 1961-1983) by Ted Berrigan (City Lights, 2022).