Itself. Rae Armantrout

Lehman and Terrance Hayes

      The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare, Telephone Books, ed. Sharmilla Cohen and Paul Legault

       Journals

      1913 A Journal of Forms, 580 Split, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Baffler, Blackbox Manifold, Boston Review, Burnside Review, Cambridge Literary Review, Chicago Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Dusie Blog, The Fiddlehead, Grey Magazine, The Hat, Jacket2, Lana Turner, London Review of Books, Manor House Quarterly, N/A, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times Sunday Review (April 15, 2012), Noö, Plume, Poetry Magazine, Public Space, The Salz-berg Review, Wave Composition, West Wind Review

one ITSELF

CHIRALITY

      If I didn’t need

      to do anything,

      would I?

      Would I oscillate

      in two

      or three dimensions?

      Would I summon

      a beholder

      and change chirality

      for “him?”

      A massless particle

      passes through the void

      with no resistance.

      Ask what it means

      to pass through the void.

      Ask how it differs

      from not passing.

A CONCEIT

      Local anchors list the ways

      viewers might enjoy tomorrow.

      One says, “Get some great …,” but

      that seems like a stretch.

      The other snickers, meaning,

      “Where were you going with that?”

      Like you thought

      Like you could defend

      vanity

      in the sense of

      idle conceit,

      vacuous self-

      absorption,

      doing whatever

      it takes to

      whatever

      because,

      really.

      As if to say,

      “Conceit

      is the vacuum energy.”

SPLIT

      Because you dodge

      yourselves

      by branching,

      (expelling particles

      of light).

      Because you split

      no-difference,

      sights strike me

      as

      A muscular gray cat

      trots

      along the top of

      the cinderblock wall

      separating my couch

      from the supermarket.

      25% say, “That’s

      just it, Pam!”

      I take these

      white streaks

      of truck

      glimpsed

      between branches

      to be blossoms.

INDUCTION

      What’s the take-away?

      Carrying plastic buckets,

      an old couple stroll

      along the high-water mark.

      The rapture: such

      wings of cloud —

      sleeves of fire

      as previously noted.

      Passing obliquely

      through the interface,

      desire is refracted.

      Low sun illuminates

      a row of amber

      pill bottles,

      half full.

CONCLUSION

      1

      A man is upset for many years

      because he’s heard

      that information is destroyed

      in a black hole.