The Brooklyn Rail

Spectacular World, No Bossanova

My friend knows lots about conspiracies, loses
his rage. We’re all crying in the big box store.

Holiday together without the sound of holiday
and knowing so much about the mysterious thing

that dazzled those people under the mountain.

Your whispering, your whispering voice
brought us chicken and dumplings. 

They were good and secret
like an idea planned otherwise,

or left out of the aimless lifeboat. 

I’m late for an appointment.
There are no angels plotting the future.

 

Suiting Up: Rubber

In the jettisoned undersea Babylon
the guardian monsters are all here.

Let’s have a party. Hum forward
the undermatter collecting on the ball

of a light bulb. 

Absolutism: where the spendthrift salaryman
needs a tie with which to hang himself.

How possible can it be to understand
the cellular phone? Again, I hear the footsteps

of Secret Idea behind me. A block of ice

containing giant monster power. This city
not bludgeoned enough. I too, am mirage.

 

In the Netherlands…

Little demoralizations draped off the edge
of a stage—the painterly folds catching 

light and casting shadow. They are little.
They are terribly normal. If this were the Arctic,

these lightmade objects would keep 

for a very long time. The dematerialization
of an object rolls slow in Greenland. 

Secret Idea’s notion of equivalency belongs
in southern latitudes. The play is over.

Another production from Hollow Earth 

theater. Come on, let’s go get ice cream
and kiss one another like actors.

 

Ethan Fugate is co-editor of the print journal POM2 (www.pompompress.com) and has poems forthcoming in Magazine Cypress, Shampoo, and Torch. He lives in Red Hook, Brooklyn.