Phone Feed: Bombogenesis
“On its way up, even before the water breaks the surface, it can seep into the cracks of basements, infiltrate plumbing, or, even more insidiously, re-mobilize toxic chemicals buried underground.” —Rosanna Xia, Los Angeles Times, January 17, 2023, documents “hidden flood risk from sea level rise and groundwater”
Scrawl a checklist to cross out how you feel. Stargaze
glass, nape story, always on the ridge of defunding
the sunrise. Live, laugh, flood, so in this terra, I am
tracking every loop Store, flood, wake.
Store, fret, wake Store, wept, wake, flood,
store I’d drink for the harbor
to recover the pasture. But portrait light identifies
my dark water mode : two people running
away at the same time. Loud steps flash
shortcuts recorded into one act:
How much did you win?
Everything dangerous because Are you my angel?
It’s still raining?
in the round world sand = cyanide = storm
scrolled in. 341 days pay to fall
terrified at the work meeting where packed sardines open
and close
flora in their mouths. Administer your raise,
red path to trap burnout. Their tin
hooks. Ready stacked moons.
Cut up frames on your camera roll, pocket
handsome covers. Sign the contract, await
the rise. Shiver on the bank, hillside
bulletins, nightships, wool trade, etc.
It’s too late, you say.
Cancel atrial trust. Oxygen wheels allowances,
sells pasture
blades. Cycles select cells designed to taper
us at both ends. Turn fusiform where forests would
message ever. Neon green must splash.
Then shave the land. Wake, flood, shore
the shepherd you want to see in the world.
VOIDS
On the phone in the coastal hole, you ask me to respond
to your VOIDS. Photos ever expanding. Out of “the thing
with feathers,” we disagree, roll thought I step between
poison oak tuffs, try on a reason distance attracts
sour [petrichor] honey
bee [death rates], etc. Center your instinct, you say,
then Faceaudio shutoff faces warmer pine
O [zone] windtrap. Cut
metaphor. I argue she never names the bird because
hope is [never singular.] 2020 is an adjective and air
smooths shellbone, thistle pins bare feet with pain that makes
each real. [What you see and look for you’ll only find
more of, and [ the real question
is will then you find
lonely.
I follow bottomless storehouse VOID I name
OVID, VIDEO,
[one letter away] from transformation. Avoiding gravity
so intense nothing [can escape, even light].
On the shore
my daughter [tries to call out Milky Way but] calls Whiskey
Way. The sun isn’t even big enough to make a black hole but
[in the dark] all exists, pandemic. How important we think
we are ablyss. Now a joke about all things,
blots govern [word states] that made us
sick. Evolution requires exclusion,
and so does rent. The hug you give her [near the parking lot,
hawk] cawing petals.
This violet stare under nightlids’
need to be free of
the coastal hole
we
roll in thought
sour
honey bee rates
I loop and
windtrap the bird
because hope is 2020 shellbone
thistle pins
to make each feather vane feel for the new
illuminute
vocabulary
VOID
I name OVID
one letter away from violet
transformation
answers my daughter “The Whiskey Way”
the sun isn’t even big enough to make
a black hole pandemic lunaptic
we think we are
. A joke
about evolution free of
parenatal heat or the bruise you give land
petals under
nightlids in the parking lot
hawkcawing
ablyss
Radio Homing
Wonder demands a tiny terror, so you call every turn
a return. The alien-most home, so we hike hill-black mounds
raising dust and clouds we call platypi, a jest for all limbs
God abandoned, and no one can spell. In the brightest heat
you receive each animal list of rocks, ridge of
leather doe smile you collapse
two years into this second dusk whispering pillowtalk,
ash feedback, unmedicated stories more beautiful than astonished
clasps of warmth around your wrist. Imagine
your mind as radio, you say, losing loam footing. I recall
Hippocampal index binds
but won’t explain experience. Every tune shines
the lake, homes-in radial, glass-lit and sure.
VOIDS
Adam Thorman and Alex Mattraw
An emptiness opens in the presence of our supposed post-truth era when facts can be defeated by baseless feeling. Defenses crack under a daily barrage against meaning. What new language is needed to unearth what gets buried? What new conversation can we have about the climate crisis, and the histories responsible for it?
This VOIDS excerpt comes from a book-length collaboration between the artist and photographer Adam Thorman and the poet Alex Mattraw. VOIDS is an experiment about juxtaposition: about hope at the edge of a future already erased. The work started with a small selection of Adam’s photograph series that he calls VOIDS, and Alex’s ekphrastic responses to it. Each created constraints for the other as the work unfolded. Some photographs inspired poems and some poems inspired photographs as both delved into their individual inhabitations of void [meaning, vacate (from Latin) and unoccupied (from Middle English)].
Moving in and out of conversations about anxiety, bliss, illness, and parenthood, fluid poetic forms and neologic play were central to Alex’s practice. Sometimes, Alex erased her original responses to Adam’s work, creating “guillotined sonnets,” Niedecker-inspired tercets, or looped erasures, with the aim of echoing images throughout the arc of an emerging narrative. Other times, she wrote lyrical prose responses to her research about the Gold Rush trading ships still buried under the Embarcadero markets.
For Adam, différance dictates that meaning is multiplicitous: Like a Magic Eye image, where you can perceptually shift between the beauty of the multiplicity and the nihilism of the negation of meaning, depending on your point of view. Either pole is overwhelming. “In the face of our current political environment, I experience a complete inability to make sense of how and why plain facts are ignored and spin outweighs all else. The calm of a landscape is not enough to placate, and I make images, just to carve the felt absences out of them.”
Out of all of this comes VOIDS. When surrounded by the incomprehensible, the only choice is erasure. Wash everything out in a field of darkness, let light obliterate and embrace. When everything means nothing, you start over at the beginning.