Kylan Rice

Sic vita

Angels’ trumpets blowing in the wind 

beside the lake enlarged when drillers 

breached the mine inside the dome

of salt, its walls dissolving as a mudflat 

formed above. Loss of structure, shafts

and tunneled atria, the cost of sudden

rushing in: your hands among the hush 

of sugar cane, a peacock’s feathers 

partially erect. The image as a form 

of dissipation, vision undermined 

by visibility, indiscriminate adjustment

of the eye. The untied knot 

of eschatology, trumpet petals sunk

beneath the scrim of algae in the pool. 

Hard to maintain fear of imminent 

collapse, integument of dread, white 

cranes inside a dry canal, satsumas 

sweeten in the cold. Instead this 

loosening of order of catastrophe, form 

and void, the slow evacuation of the land

around a sinkhole, local up until it’s not, 

while here and there the damaged roofs

are canopied with tarp. No governing

cosmology, ligament nor cord 

of three strands, what god will attend

our wedding in June, our modest life

of petty thoughts together strung, good 

cable to enforce and draw, tie down blue 

square feet of polyethylene, or bunch of violets

loosely twined into an I. The eye this knot

of veins seen red when shut against

the sun or hit, punched in the head

in the capital, mace released in the rotunda

while we fuck on an air mattress in a distant

state, fearing its collapse. Giving in then 

to these scavenged pleasures, shadows  

of doves disquieted behind a shroud 

of plastic sheets put up to keep them warm, 

clattering shells on a string beneath the eaves, 

light breeze, sugar and salt, the basic industries 

that give flavor to the region also organize 

the quadrants of the tongue, the word     

on its tip, muthos or myth, what is 

said before all else is said is all 

but on the lips, strained for, straining in itself

an end, will without object, hairbrush, 

garment, daily regimen, ground down

cherry-stones to smooth the skin, the cosmos 

also in cosmetics, that we might be 

well-placed, light-weight, pliant as a sing-

song logic is, thoughtless song that goes on, 

sweet in its stringing out, string deferring its

return to an axis, bow to its unblurred state—

35°53'28.6"N 79°02'26.4"W

something less controlled instead. a truer rot, and not this gentle

desiccation, wasp detached by frost 

from a cusp of its own making. and if not shaven fury then a visionary sense 

of dread, a glimpse of the white domes and clarifying tanks

where shit is churned to effluent 

in the sanitary labyrinth of pipes that gleam with leveled sun between the leafless trees. “injured

beauty” as one idea of the truth, a kind 

of compromise, the settling 

of solids to the bottom of the stabilizing basin as an object 

comes to rest inside the brain, crystal 

in its liquor, now 

shadowless, all one multiplex 

of inner halls of light. wherein nothing is without

its possible purities: the feather or the condom 

in the slough. or the white strips 

marking line or property 

that flutter in the woods beside the cut with concrete pedestals at intervals 

for accessing the sewage main. in the dusk’s grey

-gold you pull a ribbon from its branch and climb the manhole

of a stunted column where you show me Warrior III 

then Toppling Tree, the quiet rushing 

underneath you 

of a buried river, the activated muscle-groups inside 

your calf and thigh a counterforce 

to your constrained precarity, a risk 

that doesn’t override your silliness or tendency to take less heavily, less allowed

to settle into place, floc and biofilm, what the body has ejected self

-arranging into ribbons, zoogloeal

winding sheets that leave 

the outflow purer, and if not drinkable, acceptable 

in its toxicity 

for watering the lawn.

Jihoon Park