P a r k e r M e n z i m e r —

No, but

someday you
will wake up
in somebody’s
dirty bed—unable
to make your fingers
into a church and steeple
—with the past dead &
idealized memories
lacking convincing specifics
—like a parabolic reflector
on a municipal antenna, you
will find yourself concentrating
ambient radiation
on encrypted coordinates
—you will half-wake
because you are weak
a wayfarer on the pilgrimage
of psychotherapy—you
will wake & eat
an ice cream sandwich—if
you had successfully
evaluated the truthiness
of that first prophecy
you might, just now
be waking up
in Carthage, on a palanquin
carried by six clones
of your father—mid-carriage
to the feminine world
of copromancy & semiconductor
noise—or, in a burnt-gold
minivan, dagger in hand
like Romulus, suckling
the teat of the family
dog—we said
karma is more complex
than AM or FM radio
but how did you end up back here
in archival reports of joy?

Suffering is the Predicate

after Erica Hunt

I no longer think the end of suffering can come in a human timeframe, which

being human, implies no end to suffering, since suffering is the predicate, and life

an antecedent theory made from what we’ll call experience: that from which the notion

of timeframes has arisen. There are human garments on ideal bodies

of knowledge. Whether we suffer experience or experience suffering, suffering

increases, amounting to life, as dust amounts to bunnies—where we diminish,

life increases, suffering increases—or rather, suffering encroaches—as though it were

the black vignette that closes in on old cartoons—phenomenologically 

unsound, pure negativity, caught between substance, substrate, and narrative.

&

One cold morning, you rode a creaking bicycle alongside the reservoir

every leaf remembered the sound of your name

it hadn’t rained in weeks the basin was parched the skin of a star; waiting

for your broken cry of life

Naive Theory of Spring (at a Quaker Worship)

Shades of angels moving 
behind the world’s blue screen

tuck common knowledge out of sight
emit that whale-song homily

holy nonspace, its ambitus
encloses life, étude with holes

in which the sun-snarled blossoms fall
then disappear past algebra

tomorrow, collected in loving hands
become notes cleft in heaven’s noise

.