By Jed Munson
The caveat is essential: the delusion is sincere.
I’m entitled to my obscurity
and this megaphone as an American:
What’s a breath
mint to a lung
growth we’re waiting on
the nature of ?
What’s with the sudden plume
of grief of tiny morsels, my original
habitat spayed with Kyobo
incense.
Certain locals feed the cats
while others reprimand them,
I remain neutral,
petting everyone’s faces, feigning fuller
foreignness, the fullest, like I don’t know this kind of asphalt
with my genX knees
out of the picture we can focus
on our symptoms subsiding
with the weather, the domes
of afterthought breaching
new zones
usually above the common attention.
Some vitamin capsule.
discarded amidst low-pruned pines
and public spigots somehow working
and approachable.
I haven’t heard a gust like that
since my last dedication
to poverty. There hasn’t been a leaf
to choose me since 1984, tears
since the fake ones
four hours ago
dabbed
A cat since the cat
cooling its belly against marble.
I wait for winter on these steps,
by these principles: cash
is better like nude sleeping by a window
than the erratic tics of spring
symbolisms making last stands
across the courtyard,
bending everything into brink.
You can just picture
the rhino’s unboxing
over there, probably, one man
after another
standing aside with the coil
in a cradle. There’s every kind of Korean,
I remember, when I trip through
my family.
The tools per capita where we come from
astounding,
everything remodeled and whimpering
inside like it knows how much time
we don’t
Like the lion’s blue eyes
weren’t mythic
still I move laterally along the wall
and pick up advice from dips in the puddy
I remember thinking as it dried wouldn’t
conform to its environment.
still I trace logics of the old debates
like predestination
just to sit under the lamplight
at the end, death
the way others re-watch
movies.
I remember feeling math working its way
out of my grasp
into the instrument.
The city, when I woke,
was underwater and I’d only just been born.
JED MUNSON is a writer and editor from Wisconsin. He is a fellow at the Library of America and a student at Brooklyn College, where he helps with The Brooklyn Review. He has published two chapbooks: Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021) and Silts (above/ground press, forthcoming).
Art by Alice Penrose
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