After KubabaNo man in the village stood among the scorpions. But she arose like the sun from the node of the frozen night. Her story proceeded like parable, the sergeant opening the door to the Elysian Fields, then the escape from the desert’s turmeric tides. She leaves the village’s withered men and heads for the prophecy of the horizon. The stories of her father provided aid in the raft bed and blew through the seabirds and stars. How well the dead run with the sail. Eventually, on the third day she battled pure silence with a bronze hammer. The rain threw her a rope into the fire dark, and a house emerged on the reef of stones. But it did not delight. She needed a sliver of kiss to decorate the edge of the moon. She needed a god to appear as a word in the head. But the island kept its word. It kept it on the cusp of a visit from an enlightened being who is not possible, who is not home. The men of the treeline came together, and they saw the ascension of song and breath and medicine. They performed as they were commanded and claimed their understanding. They had brains to help them interpret their emotions. They scarred and healed, inked by the fog of happiness, and quickly spoke to the maze of infinite circumstance . . . in tongues. FalconryYour connection is not private. No. It never is. Even if you stand on a Persian carpet and wish yourself under the Crown Prince’s red tent to stand in front of his row of hooded falcons, your soul’s travels will be tracked with a beeper. The royal trainer will confirm your mental adventures, then off come the hoods and jesses and with his free hand he gestures and yells, Strike. Strike. You are the little houbara running across the sands of the Yakmach Desert. But there is still the thrill and magic in every flyer. Names are given to every falcon, and when a favorite one is lost, the president of the country does nothing but sit and weep, shout “al-Mutanabbi” for four whole days. He thinks his despair is his alone, but you bear witness the way Rilke saw Frederick the Great staring into the falcon’s inborn mind. His gaze was a quick attack. He drained the swamps and introduced the potato and the turnip to Silesia. He was the gay soldier king who kept his enemies off balance with an aggressive stance, and you are peering back at him in judgment —the man who wanted to be buried with his greyhounds because they were more loyal than humans. But as you coldly reflect on this Prussian pincushion, isn’t your view regarded with some suspicion? When will some future state lay claim to him? This moment of connection eye to eye, gland to gland, passion to passion will succumb to some far off distant-eyed vision —like the guile of the nawabs and sardars, the wisdom of the innovative king, the insight of poets who pierce the skin mid-flight. KlugeThis Anthropocene earth with its sudden administration of algorithm and dominance among apes is dancing in the cognitive ripples. A massive data center stirs and requires a reason for the infinite power grid. A tangle of narrative tells the living to proceed as the GPS girl direly advises Recalculating, recalculating. Then some errant thought heads off in the direction of your southwest leg. Not to mention the grass is slippery when wet, but when it's raining, there is no riot of motion. You’re already there-- in The Valley where abstractions go to die and all that’s left is plain and simple living. Not that many parts. And the few there are still need to be connected. The theory of the sentence tries to tie the universe together, protein by protein, each hack good enough to get the job done. So when the GPS girl tells you turn right and you end up on a printed circuit board controlling electrons flowing to Toledo, note the passing of information, the calendar software plunging into situation. These days the systems contemplate exit, and you are the clock spider hiding from its mechanism. The crust builds up, and the exceptions are coming to get you. The interactions get busy. The details don’t wash off, and throughout it all good hygiene is more and more necessary. Lord RuBisCoThe gasoline we burn began as clumps of plankton. They began to bloom when the days began to lengthen. So now we return in the Anthropocene to when the weather was perfect for them. The zooplankton eat the phytoplankton and the fishes eat the zooplankton. All the efforts of the chloroplasts cascade up as anchovies and herrings set down ion channels in the brains of animals whose neural nets click faster. The bigger the brain, the faster they wonder how to rid themselves of the dark cloud of exhaust hanging above them. These animals with their big brains release more plankton corpses and let the chloroplasts rage to draw down the cloud of carbon dioxide build-up. There’s a whole lot of carbon fixing going on, as the waters rush in over someone’s hometown. The plankton are returning to raise the name of Lord RuBisCo, the greatest of plant enzymes. How long can we tread water to honor him? We of this insufferable hemoglobin clan . . . will our vestigial gills reemerge? Or shall we serve as custodians of their spillage? They will fill the seas once again as we conspire amid our fishbone middens to rise, rise and cause them to combust in our caravans of clustered vehicles. Phrase Book ChessTo play chess with the phrase book, one must be serious. To play alphabet search in the phone book, one must develop a method to parse the surname — be it magic 8-ball or a directive from a Robosapien. The white space of the page serves as suburb to the array of words. A sentence is a winding street with multiple wireless hot spots. The preface and index plan their escape. Does the man in the exit row seat have any English? any Spanish? Cuidado Caliente. The contents of this phrase ship are headed toward a tougher audience with huge knuckles built after the birth of humanism but before the death of the author. Die My Dining NightDie my dining night, no doubt. There is no linger in my minute A hat in the rain intends by wishing the little painting lifted to a star By enemy, by intimate the night invents a limit daylight trains its stand-in and far is the white exhibit Some purpose is same as agate and attitude a name most rare changing added to the end of chilling instead of nice that upsets nude and animal empty into terminal the black asterisk content to call a burr of blood enters innocent returns a missing list so small a wrinkle on an injured bird excites the word that dresses here. Ants Ants RevolutionAnts proved that socialism works. Marx was right. He just had the wrong species. — E. O. Wilson Six tons of cement and eight thousand liters of water are poured into a mature leafcutter nest. The form is metropolis, channels and tunnels cut through the soil. The microclimates shape the paths, an internet of chambers where chemical songs cascade through the dark. Leise flehen, meine Lieder Through the income game where the fake dopamine fires every synapse calculating status. The data tangle trumps the essence of the ultimate decision, the one that keeps unraveling to fit this age’s aesthetic. Gently my songs cry and the info forensics team traces them to an island off of China, the source of all motion in the hidden Ghostnet. Schubert composed in the age of gemütlichkeit, of cozy domesticity, of fine timepieces and porcelain in the comfort of the home. The native embroidery covered armchairs, cushions, footstools, and the topics at cafes stuck to an agreeable surface. The sausage balls in Vienna were called Frankfurters while in Frankfurt they were called Vienna sausages. In this milieu Schubert wrote his cycle of swan songs. Durch die Nacht zu dir The revolution of the ant world is that everybody works for mom. The leafcutter queen dwells in her fungus garden and scatters the eggs to be daughters, drones licking the bodies of nestmates. There are very few males, ground up as inefficiency after they mate. So if I want to take part in this revolution of the ant world, I must find another use for my genitals or submit to the reality that they’ll be dead weight. At the masturbate-a-thon hundreds of men and women pleasure themselves for charity, but Slavoj Zizek says this signals the end of shame. I should be calling to you through the night instead of establishing my theory of masturbation as radical act, my faith that my breeding is necessary. In die stillen Hain herneider The city drugs the mind to dream and then we fall in love with concrete. Pozzolans are woven into the sidewalks. Blast furnace slag keeps its secret vigil suspended beneath our feet. Silica fume fends off the road salt so the bridge’s rebar won’t corrode while below in the quiet grove the parasitic ants raid the colony that lost its worker caste. Two working class men from Australia develop a stage show where they bend and twist their penises into various shapes. It’s called Puppetry of the Penis and the characters they’ve created are atomic mushroom, wristwatch, parachute, three-wood, Eiffel Tower, hamburger, windsurfer, weed-whacker, Loch Ness Monster, wedding ring, and the mollusk. Liebchen komm zu mir Do you know the city’s handshake? Is there agreement on its surfaces? Does its information call out, “Come to me, my love”? Can you recite the concrete in all its forms: the culvert, the guardrail, the grate inlet, streetlight stanchion, the port silo, the curb, junction box, roadbed, the skateboard pipe, bridge abutment, the swimming pool, and the crypt. Authentic community is possible only in conditions of permanent threat — Slavoj Zizek Flüsternd schlanke Wipfel rauschen The internet is ripe with trolls. Its strands are masked and rooted in islands. The invisible traffic adapts and connects, growing its new clusters of epidemic, its lost decisions. A day of trading passes into wind, the slender tree-tops rustle in whispers. I watch the leafcutter exhibit at the zoo among a swarm of children. The surplus clippings pile up near the tube that leads to the nest. The experts say half the colony does not do any work at all, relying on a certain set of hyperactive overachievers. The zoo is a story of adaptation. The zoo is a story of an alternative city. The zoo is a story of revolution. The children press in to take a closer look, and I feel foolish, ashamed, thinking we have mass produced too many of them. In des Mondes Licht In the last few months of his life the syphilitic Schubert pens his cycle of swan songs. His doppelgänger is the side of him already dead, sexless, poured like concrete into his end. Vienna persists in the moonlight of its Biedermeier phase, its doors hung with peals of bells decked with pearls. Schubert, near the finish, asks no one in particular -- why am I contained in this black hole? In western Iran, taqaandan, from the Kurdish, meaning “to click,” is gaining popularity. It’s similar to knuckle-cracking. The top half of an erect penis is bent forcefully while the shaft is held fixed, producing a satisfying popping sound. “It’s a growing health concern,” says one leading urologist, “the practice of taqaandan is increasing and we don’t know why.” Des Verräters feindlich lauschen The queen is forever groomed and fed by her daughters. One milligram of pheromone will commit a sister to march around the world three times. The dedicated leafcutters call to one another about the choicest leaves. They vibrate an alarm during raids. A rival colony has come to capture its fungus garden. The battle begins. Do not ignore the fiendish gods of other colonies. They peer over your colony’s progress, the hostile spying of the betrayer, then urge their followers: Fungus, fungus, for every meal! I wonder if it possesses any of the better qualities of a garden salad. Slavoj Zizek on vegetarians: Degenerates. Degenerates. They’ll all turn into monkeys. Fürchte, Holde, nicht The colony holds its breath. The colony is alive, but it does not see its death coming. Don’t be afraid, my sweet. We can build a new specimen with its bits and pieces cemented into place. We can build a revolution with a list of city shapes: the inkblot, the airplane, the bacon strip, the star, a hammer, slag heap, eternal fractal, sea anemone, Band-aid, fractured penis, the paper shredder, and the leafcutter nest. The internet is down, and its commerce is untangled decision by decision. The city is serenading its doppelgänger in death . . . or is it the city’s famous rebirth: Leise flehen, meine Lieder durch die Nacht zu dir in die stillen Hain hernieder Liebchen komm zu mir. Flüsternd schlanke Wipfel rauschen in des Mondes Licht des Verräters feindlich lauschen Fürchte, Holde, nicht. Tim Kahl [http://www.timkahl.com] is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW Books, 2009), The Century of Travel (CW Books, 2012) The String of Islands (Dink, 2015) and Omnishambles (Bald Trickster, 2019). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Drunken Boat, Mad Hatters' Review, Indiana Review, Metazen, Ninth Letter, Sein und Werden, Notre Dame Review, The Really System, Konundrum Engine Literary Magazine, The Journal, The Volta, Parthenon West Review, Caliban and many other journals in the U.S. He is also editor of Clade Song. He is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Alliance. He also has a public installation in Sacramento {In Scarcity We Bare The Teeth}. He plays flutes, guitars, ukuleles, charangos and cavaquinhos. He currently teaches at California State University, Sacramento, where he sings lieder while walking on campus between classes.
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