Three Poems
ETERNAL PRESENT
What’s a meal, I wonder, eating fistfuls of peanut butter pretzels
alone in my office. I have an office, can afford fried foods just barely,
too tender cookies much like me lacking all utility falling apart
before they reach the mouth. I get distracted. I read so slowly
in the sense of not at all then all at once, occasionally. A similar
principle holds for everything else. Love especially. I do nothing at all
by degrees. Accomplishments come on like calamities, whole days
buried under sudden ash. Like this boy I fell into bed with once,
twice, inappropriately, one of many only distinct when backlit
in retrospect. He wasn’t then but he’s a poet now, younger and more
famous than me. Jealousy wouldn’t quite be accurate, though my opinion
is hardly impartial. I wish we’d stayed in touch, he didn’t write, he loved me not,
we spewed away. I still have the cheap IKEA bed we didn’t fuck in, actually.
Warping in my mother’s garage, in the eternal present tense of art.
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME
1.
Acute hexagonal longing in the shape
of a scullery maid, hands tanned and
mouse-bitten, frock, flaxen, checked
by emptied chamber pots, sooted, boiled,
thready at the knees, pockets full
of carrot and potato peels, hair the color
of blanched acorn caps and regret
proceeding, contrapuntal, along
coplanar axes, by dissonance
of the counterfactual, bonneted, not cossetted,
cossetted, verklempt, donning now that coveted
corsetry, mealy-mouthed, the fine china, the silver,
the slivered ahistorical bridges of aquiline noses,
up in airs put-on and chilled by perfect ignorance.
2.
Little bunny froufrou, hopping through
the forest of unrequited affections
lands on a rusty nail, gets lockjaw,
goes slow. Here lies her maggoty body
where wolves who cry boy are beaten
at craps by shoes who live on old ladies
like fleas, unhappy since the advent
of the telephone, wont to send, instead
of birthday cards, past-due notices,
parking tickets, shit sandwiches,
rent increases, process servers, bad horoscopes,
while all the while bedecked heirs apparent fret
over cheese curds and whey protein, hypodermic needles
nectared with anabolic steroids, their backs
raging with acne, their windpipes pinched by trapezius.
3.
May all your mountains be subalpine,
pocketed by moss and evergreen, rompable,
the jaundiced hysteria of canola fields
held in abeyance, wistful in their
self-congratulations, set off against
a toothless network, affected, enshittified
to the glory of scoured-out hall monitors,
crossing guards, choirboys, Saran Wrapped
by upstandingness, the toast
of profit margins everywhere,
caressed by fragrant circumstances
spritzed with canapés, bonbons, options.
4.
If you give a bro a blowjob
he’ll just want another.
If you ask a rich man for money
he’ll block your number.
If the palace catches fire [if you’ve chosen violence, if you’ve laid the gasoline, if you’ve lit the
match]
let it burn.
MOUTHFEEL
The bearings I can’t get
are ball, burnished
to convex mirrors, lubed
to rubber out the idioms
of friction, if imperfectly,
with consonant precision.
All those small bore, boring
actualities pressed waferly,
fit to thimblefuls.
Appeasements
of the fleshly, of the flatulent,
of the of and of the oval, laid out
come- and lozengely. Pulled
to the point
of purpling.
I can’t say for sure
that meaning surely matters,
though it needles at me
needlessly, it seems,
slouched in arbitrary corners
of shabby-chic rooms scooped
in neat rows in vast constructions
beset by differential settlement.
So.
I am either cracking up or cracking open
at this and every other moment,
lined up as if in order,
momentous
only intrinsically,
intransigent only habitually,
and what, after all, is the difference?
∩
Cameron McLeod Martin is a queer and trans essayist and poet. They hold an MFA from the University of Idaho and their work has appeared in Fence, Black Warrior Review, The Journal, Atmospheric Quarterly, Afternoon Visitor, and elsewhere. They currently live in Clawson, Michigan.