Rick Burkhardt
The Book
Not exaggerating for effect,
doing everything for effect,
a quote in mile-high
flammable letters from the
Book of Horrible People
who appear to surround
us, so they say themselves
through various techno-social
amplification devices,
where you or I might be
“excited” in the sense of
“stimulated” or “set vibrating”
by, say, an unexpected
poetic maneuver, they
prefer their own frothily
multiplying descriptions
of ways they plan to
make themselves worse,
that they don’t like books
is a cliche, they don’t even
like modern action movies, or
the chillingly educational
protagonists thereof, whose market
has summarily collapsed,
ditto the market for
everything except guesses
on where our attention will
go next, which have become
very expensive, the dudes
employed to sell us several
thousand photographs of everything
we do are pushing us way
past our comfort zones,
every day another long novel
to memorize word-for-word
before it vanishes from
the government page
in the sun, in the cloud
April 2025
All but one of the males are banished
to lower surrounding trees introducing
a hypothetical air bubble into the dictator’s
bloodstream, the indignities one endures
May 2025
A mariachi version of “Imagine” marches
down Broadway past Zuccotti Park,
cops form a protective hemisphere
around the Wall Street Bull, the future
changes keys announcing a military parade
for the ruler’s birthday they choose Full Spectrum
Dominance over reality hoping rain will rinse
humidity from the air, white beans thickening the pasta
save money by eliminating all trade, “I run
the country and the world” and there you were
alive on video playing characters who improbably
persisted yeah the song’s a little long,
reopen Alcatraz and double the cost of foreign films
for Christmas he says, buy your child five pencils,
throw money into Bitcoin for the rich to catch,
they just heard about India and Pakistan but they’ll
be ready to colonize Mars in four to six years,
you’ll find a parking space a mile away white
smoke above the papal palace wetting
fingers in your mouth on a dark highway they
sculpted from stone slabs, sewing stars of
white thread into fabric night, all their mythic
motions smoothed. Capitalist evil becomes a
go-to plot point, but the really bad ones use drugs
on a mountain, just the brick chimney survived
the fire walking on heels to keep toes from the
rain runoff, this river history remembered
by a cannon, you’ll have to eat it faster since
it’s already day-old, he sneers, anybody
can pay for things, a plane gifted by a dictator
coated with gold and rust, methane from his
chatbot cloaking Memphis, christening computers
dopey names from sci-fi like most evil geniuses
he’s actually stupid, scarred by the bandaid
the doctor flip-flops on your medication, rents
out the bedrooms and lives rent-free in the
common space. “It [the Constitution] might
say that, but” holding down a job is comedy,
holding down all jobs is tragedy, it’s irreverent,
it’s unapologetic, it’s murderous, it’s apocalyptic,
major anniversaries in the history of racism
turned my notebook into a wallet. Each store
front makes its own chocolate. The closest
we come to politics is the ancient
Greeks, surprisingly minimal insight,
when I need experimental grief assistance I won’t
come here, passing real laws in the figurative dead
of the literal night. No trolley, no problem.
No art, no deal, senators beg for services
they just cut, striving for human progress
without the humans, twenty-three years
from the “great society” speech to the
“society doesn’t exist” speech, new tech
enables friends of mine who’ve never met
to argue violently, but how could that be you
on this street in this country spraying around
my ankles the official transcripts, gone
in a puff of transparency, he accused me of
words having meanings, I sat wondering
about the dangerous angle of my neck,
biting off six thousand international students
to spite the face of intelligence. Only elitists
enjoy well-written paragraphs, shaking the
hand of a felon at West Point, stay and listen
to me talk about a poet who wrote of
emptied landscapes, featureless buildings,
deserts with no events, as if his
goal was to describe nothing, this is
a collage of those fugitive travels, some
barely moving, using human consciousness
doesn’t require the entire electrical grid of
Tennessee the way your voice surprises me
by lilting upward, leaving you two days
to find an apartment, forehead pressed into pillow,
a stupid person’s idea of a smart college.
Aftertaste of awful in the broken water,
I too must have rubbed too hard against the
oldest general store in the United States,
going against the spirit but not the letter
of the blues his instrument finds contaminants
off the scale, violent ICE arrests on the
hotel breakfast room TV, the next billionaire
steps into the last’s still trembling air,
wind knocks the power out.
just to play melodic gongs, restaurants
close for days after the feast, slurp the flesh
off the seed, every inch of you I taste
sprawled asleep on the sidewalk,
no cushion, neck bent back, an art museum
occupied as a military base by the Japanese
then bombed by the US tweeting “only the weak
will fail!” in all caps, bright yellow
and five inches at its widest coiling
around his shoulders, the wealthy have
glass in their windows, snarls of power lines
strung in the dozens from the same poles,
their sister city, San Antonio, represented by
a pair of 15-foot boots. They dislike dictatorship
when it loses them money, white butterflies
pollinating international friendship gardens,
metallic boyband in the stone replica
(not a real castle, but real stones!) animalian
figureheads compete for pond turf suddenly
the taxi’s front wheels roared up 40 degrees,
you gazed over a thousand brightly colored
roofs and sighed “they have a good government”.
Today’s arrest quotas met by ignoring laws
the national animal helps the farmer
we evolved to the point where we could call
this a parrotfish, the President’s first 100 crimes
feeling the water rush the eardrum, your song
of being the sole survivor above the canyon’s
lips tease each other with near meetings,
hi-ho the derry-o the doctor in the mall
the child comes out blurry in photos, decides
to play for ten minutes with a tragic emotion,
an overflow congregation of thousands half
this island is a selfie vortex sleeping
in airport chairs our last few minutes on the shuttle
pressure in the bridge of the nose jousts against
pressure in the cabin, big budgets sink ships
midcentury male heroes and their tragic-but-not-
too-tragic easily-overcome flaws, when she dances
the flashing lights free her and us from the strictures,
no escape from reality lasts long, but this
is her reality, not ours, and she’s fictional.
Today’s polite but insistent letter concerns
what makes us human? taxes, jobs, dates,
poems, using toilets, baseball, they can’t think of
any original ways to be fascists, so they’re going
after people with autism bored by the slow
crescendo of tension, lost in the hallways of
the doctor’s office, millions of us holding signs,
relying on accumulation of meanings by sitting
and eating a burrito outside the restaurant where
I didn’t buy anything and they don’t sell burritos,
I drummed up lots of business for them
did you have to put meat in the soup?
I ask you to speak up in the whirling traffic even
the pope said our economic system is dangerous,
they erase your social security
number and mark you “dead”,
name today after the Earth, their shells
grew too soft, their parents
attempting to warm them with their bodies
instead destroyed them leading to
intergenerational distrust, a news cycle
governed by events, we will take your
power plant and Mother Russia gendered
and aged to perfection will take the rest,
a man defunds a tree (“Vladimir, STOP!”)
measles are now progressive on a warrant
called administrative you can pull a man
out of court to arrest him again,
soon he may return to test his beloved
disguised as a simple end rhyme deported
at the age of four from the country where
he is a citizen without cancer medication
or lawyers, poets shout
above rain on the roof canvas,
desperation ditched by shuttle bus,
executive orders may not direct or empower
government employees to break laws,
“Executive Branch” the name of a new
D.C. access-bargain club for laundering
billionaire bribes, one thousand steel-tipped
mountains in the tectonic bay “wondering
if you can trust the nuclear codes to people
who don’t know how to organize a group chat,”
build a successful sandwich even with
weak-link bread, a recorded voice says “daybreak”
quieter and quieter until your hearing is perfect,
we watch the film of her she didn’t
want made, the President’s first
one hundred crimes just try to network
with me sharing a park bench silently
Laurie Price
A portrait dark
Sky’s everything, its etymology of birds and stars, planets,
comets tilts into the wind – your hand curves a portrait
dark & provocative that makes a collage of personism
with global strategy whereby mornings won’t be like
yesterday, oh no. Now everything’s changed. Hooligans
have taken over the vast ness of vast and they mean
to last long past a tolerated splinter. The shard
that wrecks my idea of endurance is not only sharp
but bloody. Relations where there’s always conflict
are more urgent now. Policies play a stringent role
and the keyword is play. This is no game, tho; no
one can win. Who gets played? Wonder at the empty
green fire of us. Hairline light lines range across
the already mottled surface you create, attenuated
by your own clenched eyes. Keep your sight line on that.
At this point
If alignment could help reassert that truth matters, I’d realign.
And you? Can you imagine where a spacious mind ends I mean
there’s probably some limit or ragged edge where space
is marred but we’re always starting over, no? Look, a new
milk carton sans photos of missing children because
at this point we’re all missing, or kidnapped, psychically,
daily, not heard and only barely seen. There’s a screen
for every desire, a caption that’ll hold someone captive,
but for each quick “answer” questions overheard hover,
invade your peace. Let them in. Give them space.
Signals
To take apart what won’t work doesn’t imply fix
where a lingering arched eyebrow lifts shifts
amidst its attributes. Curtains wouldn’t mark
the ceiling in a really strong wind here either.
Sunlight interstices between the petals of
an Azucena, trades invisible for bright.
The most necessary gift: illumination.
Two gigantic shoulders hunch in ponderance
where empty air seeps. This might or not be
called thinking. A square is a place to assemble,
a shape to join. Nothing neural in making that clear.
Where we are is here, dangerous impasse or where
signals are sent but gradients of there miss the hitch.
Track Forward
Spools of sad ephemera emit surfaces
and patterns spill strangely onto earth as if
nothing mitigates complexity further than
what disappears into dust. Fractals are breathing
rituals that sublimate skin, exhale connotations
like as to distort facts, but then poem cave opens,
flickers into future where question marks dominate –
like what can be said of or would it have
tracked forward, the only direction after
all known bridges are blazed?