for Tom Devaney
On the eve of never forgetting I still
want to run away from you together or
not run but bite or register bionic judgment
always there to be crushed by unblinking
jacked and futuristic Some trees are easier
to climb than others Ailanthus for example
with a ladder leaned up against it or a poplar
that’s been used to make a staircase From up
here the subjective experience is but a fading
metonymy and now to me at least it’s gone
Under entropy even better entropy impatient
for flow charts with a wicked jaw already
I am not permitted to believe my own ideas
but nod a little as I say them so others
concur and say it back tainted with the real
The real lyrics are always somewhere under
the words the way the night gets out of the past
or pushed around by the mere concept of
morning And the scary thoughts you flee from
you mostly flee as A kind of professional courtesy
towards oblivion and reciprocity for old
sayings like you have to send a letter to get one
especially if you send the letter to yourself
###
Over two decades in the making, Brendan Lorber’s first full-length book is coming out this spring. It’s called If this is paradise why are we still driving? He’s also written several chapbooks, most recently Unfixed Elegy and Other Poems (Butterlamb) He’s had work in the American Poetry Review, Fence, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Since 1995, he has published and edited Lungfull! Magazine, an annual anthology of contemporary literature that prints the rough drafts of contributors’ work in addition to the final versions in order to reveal the creative process. He lives atop the tallest hill in Brooklyn, New York, in a little castle across the street from a five-hundred-acre necropolis.
“One With the Wind” appeared in Cleaver Magazine: Issue 20 in December of 2017.
Look for new work from Brendan Lorber in TLR: Chemistry, the all-poetry issue, due out later this month.