New | Poetry | Luoyang Chen

Artwork by Jo Nin*

The Sea is the Possibility

 

Sitting on an empty park bench, 

Flow is sunning himself.

No. That’s a lie. The wind blowing leaves 

Sounds like waves hitting rocks.

The sky is gloomy.

Flow is not in the park. He is at the beach 

Searching—

A hidden poem. A hidden eddy in the sea. A sea that is the possibility. A possibility of falling and being pushed back on the shore. Lurching. Full of sands. Not pretty. Though they will eventually fall away from him. The sea rejects him the way his mind rejects his body. The love that bonds them, like the sands on his body, is greedy but never ever sticky enough.

Wittgenstein and Flow

 

Wittgenstein came to see Flow last night. He spoke in German. But does it matter? Flow likes to take things to an extreme. He has been eating Marinara Spaghetti for a month, for example. He is thinking Thai tonight.

Flow should have called him Ludwig, not Wittgenstein. But Wittgenstein is a masterpiece. Define ‘master’. Define ‘piece’.

Enough languages. Enough games now. Do not play. 

Come,

flow with—

 

(*Artwork via wikimedia commons)

(The poems are from the collection Flow, published by Red River) 

New | Poetry | Kevin R. Pennington

Artwork by David Damour*

 

Antikythera Mechanism

 

Perhaps I am a

Antikythera Mechanism,

rusted, broken, forgotten,

like the tubes of the

mighty Colossus Mark 2,

disassembled and

decommissioned like

Alan Turing himself.

 

I am a 

punch card

from the

room-sized

mainframe days:

a forgotten

relic 

technology

from a 

different 

time.

 

Trauma curves 

my mind into a

Calabri-Yau manifold,

a quantum shape

that twists and turns

upon itself in ways

I barely comprehend.

It is a knot that

complicates my mind.

I must untangle

it somehow, but

I have no map of

what it should

look like, nor

any personal

geometry 

to rely upon.

 

I am a ghost particle

that decays quickly.

Gravity binds me

to the black hole’s

singularity.

Jets of energy,

the universe’s most

exact clock,

spins like a top.

 

Millions of 

tachyons

go backwards 

in time,

carrying me 

with them. 

 

In the formal

dining room,

the grandfather

clock fails to strike 

seven o’clock,

and even the

coo-coo bird 

goes back inside

to hide.

 

I must face

my manifolds,

my knots,

my mind

 

            slowly,

            delicately,

             deliberately.

 

Can I unravel the knots

before I unravel myself?

 

 

 

Metamorphosis

(for Kristin Pennington)

 

Duhkha

 

Pain festers:

A terrible infection

throughout my body,

pulsing in agony,

pus-filled abscesses,

acne on my balls.

 

I transform

into something

from Kafka

or Burroughs.

 

I become a bug,

a cockroach, 

a talking asshole,

that lives in the

darkness of

my own mind.

All the while 

waiting for 

someone to

tell me I am

worthy of

my own 

humanity.

 

I want to ease

my suffering,

but it lingers still.

My coping

mechanisms are

ineffective.

I need a surgeon

to cut deep inside

and remove the

dead flesh that will

never heal.

 

Dammit,

everyone changes

as the years go by,

even you and I,

but the violence

in our minds

does not subside

until we find 

solace.

 

Yet even when

I do calm down, I

fear I’m in the

eye of the storm,

and that there is

another destructive

hurricane on the

horizon.

 

 (*Artwork via wikimedia commons.)