Brendan Lorber
THE SUN TURNED AWAY
We were facing the sun but the sun turned
away and left us to answer how can I
find myself in your eyes and be okay
with what I see there? It doesn’t take long
for the gun nuts to Wagner the capital
of what we want to think of as home
despite the parts left over after building it
Maybe throw out the instructions
wasn’t the most okay step one to put in
the instructions even if being okay isn’t
the point of living in a country with
founders too psycho to go on living
in their own I hope the dirty side of the
storm scours the dour neighbors outside
I MISTOOK A BREAKTHROUGH
I mistook a breakthrough for a broken wing
which it also was now boarding for a “joy ride”
or “voyage of discovery” but only how they name
the wind for where it’s from not headed towards
The broad sluice between all sensations blank
from the outside and within The violence of
imposed tranquility impedes even the off-kilter rituals
of yesterday’s other age from burlesque to buybacks
so going around cities was granted one purpose in the street
and another in the sheet music whose denoted municipal
clatter had its own role to keep the city’s eerie chorus hidden
until tonight’s multi-octave rock serenade of bird
and ambulance calls and first responders radio static against
the goodbye hiss of tainted air through gingko tree branches
WHEN THE STREETS EMPTY THE MIND
When the streets empty the mind fills
but not with thoughts for those too have left
along with the appointments and unexpected
impressions there once were to make
I was the last kid picked for the team enough
times to recognize the final hail mary cures
don’t really want a part of this game either
There were other stories but now the news plays us
out with songs of laughter falling to third
place as the best medicine behind sacrifice
(from us) and brutality (towards us) and all
the homespun cures right here in the schmutzy
pigeon talons and sidewalk gum whose black
polka dots mask an underneath bright with antivirals
NO ME TO SAVE NOR LOVE TO HAVE
I always hoped someone would save me but there is no me
to save nor love to have unless you’re pretty far off-
menu Like the first person to have wasabi and think
ok this is food this decongestant epiphany unveiled between
glee and triage I love the space between us as the source
of inexplicable elation that sends one soaring precisely because
it’s groundless and occupied mostly by the surly teen
in the back who half asks why and if you have to respond
why what? you’re not the person to be answering the question
because nobody is It’ll take more than a golden vocabulary
in the most adroit order to save the poem and for the poem
to then do the work of saving us all from a presence already
sequenced into a note on the pillow that says the single-
celled state we emerged from would like us
Brendan Lorber is the author of If this is paradise why are we still driving? and several chapbooks, most recently Unfixed Elegy and Other Poems. He’s had work in The American Poetry Review, Brooklyn Rail, Fence, McSweeney’s, The Recluse, and elsewhere. His visual art is in The Museum of Modern Art, The Free Black Women’s Library, The Woodland Pattern Center, The Scottish Poetry Library, and in private collections and has been featured on CNN, NBC’s The Today Show, and Oprah. He was the editor for Lungfull! Magazine and The Poetry Project Newsletter. Presently, he teaches fantasy cartography and co-hosts Overhear a cross-generational reading series in Brooklyn. Brendan lives in a little observatory in Brooklyn.
