“IV”

from Seismic Mediumicity

by Jake Syersak

A skull dropped anchor 

where the forest lost its mind and became the woods,

    the ornateness of how could I

happen here

       Like a spine,

       corkscrewing 

           from the windshield

of a brand-new Lamborghini,    America is exactly this—

the absolute detour, the Untree

                       Exactly this

   Under the snailshine of stars, 

killdeer and scrub jays 

peck insects from an old, discarded Coca-Cola can 

        A feeling like a thousand-and-one eyes

opening into some withoutless war, 

 

some brutal clarity

 

    When I learned that, 

for every one human on earth,

    there are 2.5 million ants,

I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not

    they dream

 

and if they dream,    what they must do 

with all that dreaming; where theirs, and mine, and ours must go

Do trees like dreams soft-serve so easily into the sky, like lips 

around a wound,

cling to, or crust against

       Reasonless with rhyme—

It must be like a river, though,

into whose ocean I can’t imagine goes

 

Exactly where America flows

Jake Syersak is the author of the poetry books Mantic Compost and Yield Architecture. He is also the translator of several works by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine and Tahar Ben Jelloun. His work has received grants from The National Endowment of the Arts and PEN/Heim. He currently lives in Olympia, WA.

Image credit:

“Robert John Thornton, “The Maggot-Bearing Stapelia” from <em>New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus : And the Temple of Flora, or Garden of Nature</em>. London, 1807. Available at: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/32.&nbsp;