Michael Sikkema
Two Poems
Essay
Edges fading to open solid borders hum the fluid insides. Less like a puzzle than a cheese bar.
All the do poems lined up against all the about poems. The angle of all this seeing should at
least be denied like civilian casualties. This heaviness is
flamboyant as
a thumbprint
or a sonata. All the do poems laid down with
all the about poems and we caught them kissing. Sooner or later the game show truth comes
true. You’re left with a blender and six new sets of living room furniture. One house has sixteen
windows. One house has none. You can’t go on like this. The city is/was five miles by five
miles. 20 year old soldiers paint
messages on
the bombs before
they drop them. The radical fact of being is not really. No more
than no more again. No more than suddenly not being. Anger wets everywhere and the room is
smaller than yesterday. She says “there’s a ring around the moon.” She’s inside a radio there is
no she. But I hear “a thing among the room.” I hear traffic through tree sounds and birds which
there are none. You keep writing frame edge glass mirror eye yellow key net. . As if you
weren’t me. Anger in this soil’s
memory has something
to do with us. There is the tendency to push
the house inside the room. As if the writer weren’t the reader. There is a new movement in
denial. Atmospheric dust contains a magnetic charge. American soldiers are “investing” in Iraqi
dinars. Human bodies bounce when hitting the ground at high speeds.
Time Was There Was No Question
A person pictures the camera backwards facing light. He has four sons, a gender like five sons walking between buildings. Red shirts, red towels, and red sheets fill with wind, false-bottomed sky. Men in boats shout anthems. Lift becomes left. He and his sons uncover the document, the magic one, near a window front filled with cut-glass dolphins leaping from cut-glass water. They open to a two-page sketch of screw gardens and milk. The youngest son traces a scrotum motif, a melon split. The oldest tears it up, makes demands, a list of questions. The others go for tea, clean dirt. The camera angle adjusts to turn faces.