People Analytics

Does your brain know a way to the end? (Data point.) Have you ever cried in bed with another person? (Data point.) When was the last time you made something with your hands, like bread or a little clay castle? (Data point.) You don’t both have to have cried. (Data point.) Searching a long time for what to watch, long enough to have already seen something all the way through. (Data point.) Do you remember love, or hope for it? (Data point.) Both? (Data point.) …Neither? (Data point.) What is your relationship to pain? (Data point.) The things you make with your hands (if any), are they mostly for eating or for play? (Data point.) Any allergies? (Data point.) Do you think of the moon as cold? (Data point.) If the world was older, do you think you’d still be in it? (Data point.) In the long logarithm of evening, when do you decide to set down your burdens? Try again later? (Data point.) Tomorrow? (Data point.) How often do you get up and go for a walk? (Data point.) Listen to your favorite music? (Data point.) Read the poems of Barbara Guest? (Data point.) Mistype “Dead” for “Read”? (Data point.) Make jokes about communism for which the conceit requires grossly overestimating its cachet in America outside of literary circles? (Data point.) Fall in love with someone you don’t know or can’t have? (Data point.) Both? (Data point.) Offer evidence for Mandelstam’s assertion (tr. here by the McKanes) that “Quiet work silvers / the iron plough and the voice of the poet.” (Data point.) Argue with the swans. (Data point.) Feed animals a sign says not to. (Data point.) Re-read The Romance of American Communism. (Data point.) Tell a lie to protect yourself. (Data point.) Tell a lie to protect someone else. (Data point.) Say something your father always said. (Data point.) Feel sane as a snow globe. (Data point.) Break your clay castle in half. (Data point.) Accidentally hit a bird who was just trying to get at something in the road, probably a surfaced worm or other precious bit of food, beneath the snowmelt. (Data point.) Skitter across the river road at night with brightly flashing eyes. (Data point.) Unlock your phone. (Data point.) Ask google all the sounds animals make. (Data point.) Offer ratings for products or television shows. (Data point.) Complete the survey on the receipt. (Data point.) Circled in dying pen. (Data point.) Sourdough bread. (Data point.) Gone to pay and tapped your card in the wrong place a bunch, so it looks like you’re trying to will money into the black plastic machine with an ineffectual spell. (Data point.) Update Firefox. (Data point.) Received a fortune that promised financial good news, only for the general hand-to-mouthness of it all not to abate any. (Data point.) Eat the most beautiful six syllables on earth. (Data point.) Fast food soft serve ice cream. (Data point.) Vanilla from a bag (data point), like white gold

Poem

Rip the bandaid off flowers
The closeness of grocery carts
Fuzz on new antlers

Yes I am happier
I gave happier answers
On the questionnaire

Conflagrations

you
won

Sad Passions

An expert in Fine Art
Removal reduced to removing
pool tables from basements

those new build stairs
that haven’t settled yet, still
creak with changes

in temperature or humidity
or temperament, the clavier
no bargain either

one of the only things
you may have to pay
to give away. I pushed it off

the moving truck into the land
-fill with my father in law
& imagined the person who made it

seeing this, its fate
technically still
in pieces / of music

I Wonder What Marie And That Drum Major Are Up To Now In Heaven

Beauty’s beak notched the egg, scratched the shell but didn’t break it. Scored with a thin black dash, a half-rest in a symphony. When it fell in the field, its head against the grass, the mark would be hidden. Hidden in death but outside it, separate(d) from it. Legible to worms emerging after the storm.

When Marie sings the drum song it’s because she knows beauty, knows it like a language she hasn’t spoken since she was small and age was a party and rocks hid bugs beneath them like wriggly secrets. Marie’s soul goes forward in time and withdraws $40 from an ATM; she folds each bill into a bird and then sets them on the water, together for as long as the linen holds out, then when they do sink and eventually decay how they will enrich the soil, she thinks, how the river mud will be thick with presidents and numbers, how it will trust in god.

Marie took her sick kid out of school to get ice cream. His shake had a strawberry that kept getting stuck in the straw, and when he cried she said Don’t worry and lifted the lid, ushered the strawberry out, and gave it to him. Sweet syrup had soaked through the seeds so you could hardly see them. He sniffled a little and sucked on the strawberry piece and Marie thought maybe next year we can have his party here, at Dairy Queen.