Ann Lauterbach
Book
Why, you may ask, is the book wounded? Did it
fall from grace, did you leave it sitting in grass
when the rains came, did you spill your glass
onto its pages? No answer, because you
do not know the answer and neither do
I, in whose hands the wounded book
rests and whose stiffly curved pages
turn like the leaves of a calendar, an agenda,
those books we once held and daily
inscribed: meetings, calls, dinners, bills.
In my own, you will find whole
weeks empty, as if I had left for a while, as if
I had no appointments in time.
Tears flowed past us into a basin called infinity.
Celebrity
Specter or genii gallops across, wings, legs
slinging air over the below piles and their
increments of dust. In the evening
green looks sallow, a rudimentary exhale,
gloss, rub of ointment
onto toes, feeding milk
from a spoon. Which of these incidents
is real? An ugly bug is on a journey
across the world’s stage. It shall be arrested
at the intersection of two mountains
before the floods come, before the chocolate melts
and the elaborate hoax is discovered behind clouds.
Popularity is the organic outcome
of an appealing superstar’s bond with her fans.
Cull
Adjacent to time, a napkin imprinted with leaves,
a rug, leftover crumbs, indented, the weight of a body
after the body, lifted without wing, lifted or borne
upward, a clause of innuendo which, like hope,
has no perceptible shape but hangs in morning air
invisible as taste, jays arguing under the pear tree,
its reach revealed in the stark amphitheater,
figures in mind figures crumpled down on a sidewalk,
the stench of the real always rising. Look, look.
come closer, there is nothing here but mere life. Then
friends helped her load a truck with the food, along with
donations she had secured — socks, toothbrushes, cellphones.
Who suffers most? At moments over these weeks, the struggle
for a monopoly on suffering has usurped everything else.
Donate!
O to be extremely excited to share, to be
included to be asked and again asked to
support to agree to desire to commit to allow
to believe to do whatever to meet matching funds
doubled and tripled until the deadline to be
at the receiving end, to be spoken
to as if catching a ball thrown high
above the heads of all the players, so there
now is only the ball in the air and only
the ask, and only this appreciated response,
this thank you so much for your inquiry, thank you
|
I’m
checking in because the deadline for my official
Election Year Priorities Survey is at midnight tonight, and I’m still missing your response. |
Fanon
There are many persons I have never heard of.
For instance, Joe Rogan. Who is Joe
Rogan? Should I have known this name
before now? That I have never heard this name
until now, what does that mean?
Does it mean I am out of touch?
We all are out of touch, if we mean, by touch,
that we actually touch each other, or have ways
to touch each other, keeping or staying or being.
The hands, for instance, their fingers
find their way to other
hands and fingers, how they reach, how they
find the small of the back, the turned mouth.
Hatred, he wrote, cannot constitute a program.
Ann Lauterbach’s eleventh poetry collection, Door, was published in March 2023. Recent essays are “Art of the Unbeautiful True” in Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable (Princeton University Press 2023) and “Topos Non Topos: Notes on David Novros” (Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2023). She lives in Germantown, New York.
Read next: Poetry by Ron Silliman
Visit our poetry archive