Performed by Val Cole

READING:

Existential Hazards of the Mythmaker, by Michelle Chen
In English class we learn how the lotus flower, native
to Guyana, is a fiction of resilience, but under keen
Chinese eyes blooms purity in the dark. Because critical
interpretation never lies – unlike climate deniers, harms none
with narcissistic subjectivity, personal insight,
the queer naked streams and rivulets it produces
from ash-dusted inkwells, bound and gilded paper sonnets
all reversible with the tenderizing root of a whip, breaking-in
of a sand-flecked mustang lost and grazing celestial beneath
the shifting leaves of cottonwood understories – good argument.

But no words may possess where I’ve lived for nineteen years
no debater may capture any time zone, nor grammatical instructor
invade conservation with unwieldy tradition, not epic novel lectures
timed before Aristotelian systems collapsed – earth, wind,
fire, water, Ptolemaic heavens spinning vulnerable circles,
quintessence of stars, planets, antidote of all disease. In other
words, seek geopolitical tensions of a single tulip planted
in an English garden, unnatural clusters in Europe’s
Chinese courts perfuming medieval midnights. They say
rising tides and heat waves live and die without intervention,
how the four elements of emotion wash over us
in Mandarin before vanishing.

In twenty-four seasons watching cherry blossoms fall on Park Avenue
with the muddied runoff of gasoline-soaked snow, believing winter
and spring never fought, or were torn apart, loved or even recognized
one another – only consumption’s sorrows, creeping steam
treatments for asthma, boiling water into clear diamond glasses,
cirrus bubbles foaming away lead in dreams, ghostly
chromium 6 combusting liver, lungs, womb, high fevers.
Public housing’s chlorine mutations, the magic of pretending
and oblivion. For the female titan Theia bestowed elements
their brilliant looks, forgetting beauty attracts misfortune. Only
known for the children she bore, she of starry cow-eyes.
Her roving gaze searches for governmental carelessness,
crafting mid-victorian diseases of melting, torrential rains,
skin slickened in debauched contact – how the drought
is our thirst, flooded air all our gasps.