BURNING HOUSE PRESS

The River of Ever-unbrightening Bees is Cataclysm-colored

by Jake Syersak

I wish the clouds weren’t hanging like the nonsensed nooses they are, with just this right amount of je ne sais quoi

to hang oneself with, America

I mean to unmean you: unwilt you: Miró you, into some better, more mesmeric

flower that I can’t yet imagine


“Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves”


Sometimes, this world feels like I just want to sleep through it already, like a buzzsaw disappearing burr

by burr, into the sequential blur: the blue stairs all around

us: into a strand, a stream of hydra-headed hydrangeas, petalpuked, florafloating the cerulea


What distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is beyond me, but I see it feelingly, nevertheless,

this nuance of flowers, of fires;

I watch an insect clean its eyes, and mine grow meadow-ful, marooned-in-me-ful,

outside-of-meaning-ful


Once, on psilocybin in a forest in British Columbia, I had the experience that I was traveling on a train

made entirely of glass, giving the effect

of the environment passing through me, rather than I through it, for once


I leaned my head gently against a window

and it was April’s, and I thought, I want to unkill so many things, and that’s all

poetry really is;

you make it or you don’t, like love, and you see yourself through

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.