Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Brendan Lorber! Celebrate by reading these Lorber poems we published in 2022! After that, go read Lorber’s “How a Poem Happens to Happen”! And then go read the ten Lorber poems we published in 2019!
The creature making noise
As long as the creature making noise in the wall stays in the wall
it’s fine for the moment to be invisible especially if we’re the
creature We see only what we can imagine and what’s here
is invisible ’til it’s gone like our friends’ innocence or the rainforest
into an airquoted reliquary of forget-me-nots The rings of a tree
that counted on us to convert our winking heirlooms into less prosthetic
visions of the future We’re so good at irony because it’s what we
were handed off to so often it sprang new sincerities the way
a starfish stops growing new legs after having enough of them cut off
and starts growing knives We can agree what killed the dinosaurs
is back but not what it is or even if there ever were dinosaurs
The dread of having overlooked something is so patient how it waits
for all the copies to be printed with typos on the frost line which
we forgive long enough to build a way of life that unravels itself
To be afraid of death is proof you’re still alive
To be afraid of death is proof you’re still alive so I’ll forgive my fears
as my fears forgive the death of all certainty in the latest report
that says we’ll be dead in a month but was written two months ago
Being lost is kind of an arrival the way a garden overrun with
perennial faceplants becomes the sort of home that breaks into itself
and leaves something behind From here, I can see the unrevealed
unraveling has already been composed Though I can’t tell if it ends
with a long national weekend of sheesh, that was weird or moving day
to where the chalk outlines suit our clothes and the etymology of half-
forgotten words gets made new again aboard foreign ships in the
harbor The cheerful toe tag’s belief there might be anyone left
to read its final words at the orphan-run five-borough mobile quicklime
ossuary that wheezes uncertainly among sunlight slanted particles
as though meaning meant anything to the empty space we vent into
The impersonal upholstery of dark math
The impersonal upholstery of dark math wasn’t designed to provide
comfort even if a number like pi goes on long after the thrill
of counting is gone We didn’t ask to be fleas the earth chose
this night to shake off Or dander on the lint brush Not even essentials
get a break Especially not them But numbers remain strategic in their
abstraction the way steps of a checklist keep pilots too busy for fear
during the kind of emergency where enough parts have fallen from the plane
that maybe it’s not a plane anymore but more of a flakey acquiescence
from hard science into the pi day memes of a nation born under a new sign
like kick me and slowly dying of boredom before the coming quicker
death from within that’ll knock the intimate lyric up the charts and
into six-foot plumes of the human biome where none shall pass this
homecoming weekend that stretches indefinitely epic and prepping
to be tutored by the glinting scythe of American exponentialism
Come to the window my sweet
Come to the window My sweet sense of the night lets you see half
drunk cups of tea on Peter’s table as he fights a new cough with ideas
that make the twentieth century exist like statuary brought to life
when its subject shows up and nonchalantly leans against itself to explain
statues are more alive than people because they have a purpose and
one gets a low tide Matthew Arnold vibe on his sad Dover Beach honeymoon
until Peter spills the tea on which brittle part of the system the disaster will
snap off first to chew and you realize it’s probably the floor under you
unless you’re lucky as he was a kid in the London Blitz and later the go-to
to get from the Vietnam draft Did I mention Peter’s old age is like
being young again I imagine in that you imagine you can just look out
the window and see how it’s all going to end and maybe you can with a memoir
written faster than you can live it recited underneath a cough as quiet as gravel
footsteps on the far end of a driveway walking to the house with news
The self-defense class is all in
The self-defense class is all in on Aurora’s strong feelings
about violence but not what those feelings are beyond
unearthing new kickable sources of discord as the new family
tradition I should know better than to ask how today went
when the answer is my plexus at the nexus of her birthday Docs
I’m not mad at you they say I’m mad at your need for protection
and at anything that masquerades as certainty awful as any virus
that learns by doing us in Like how it was once impossible to sleep
without Puppy and now it’s impossible to sleep because Puppy
doesn’t talk to her anymore Her perception of reality rendered
him dead and her parents on their way Is there some secret language
I can use to bring him back? To align the inner and outer worlds
and to make the imaginary true? Where everything inert is alert
alive conversational and angry to be considered anything less?
