i.
waking up in the skin you wore into this one life of yours, to have
your dimly-illumined & shelled
mangosteens sweat out
the weather while i take an entropic bath underneath the frosty gust:
rind of red tide precipitating behind the EXIT sign—
in the event of a lock down,
whipping the phone out
for machine learning emergency services;
work up the bandwidth to rouse a whole ecosystem to pioneer spirit:
your body battered in islip & whitings haul the fisher in, against the pull of maritime winds.
north of 41°, on an island out of sound, i make den with upstate martens & plant my legs.
if you love the fight & can afford the strain, you’d drive up blue ridge in this rain—
to face the polar high with a fruit knife & the maker
who’s perfected the mandolin.
ii.
leaving your shoes on the lakeshore & leaning windward, to see
pines lathered with planktonic palm oil.
you’ll slice the wheel for supper &
dress the fish for confessional
in the video booth that stays
IN USE for a US dollar.
(in the winter of ‘89, after the wall fell & buried electricals reaching the wisconsin dells,
friends of friends shouting until they’re blue & free in the face…)
clearing the table of nuclear waste, to make more
space for filling: pressure rises, heat sinks.
iii.
this is an interlude from panama city,
west of the bridge of the americas;
dew crawling over a sea of manduvis
where before, they weren’t but vapor;
where after, the pacific feels warmer…
iv.
i lay on a bed of cordilleras sprouting giant basalt columns where they meet the sea: lowland hardwoods & grasses that’d map their lineages through the overwintering passerines.
i won’t chance being a stranger to the steeliness of day.
i point you to an almanac for tomorrow’s ebb, to go catch crabs of the hermeticum.
old man coriolis shatters black mangroves, though the sloths are unmoved: their hours hang on a cercropia tree sprouting every-which-jungle & on the grit of one continual dream, hand passing over hand, they’d hurl ligaments over simmering sand & walk as if in perpetual shambles.
even horses of the atlantic camouflage behind earthworms.
if our planet had more room, we’d make more segments of ourselves;
how else were the pyramids built if not roped, then fooled by the thread of existing
hitched to the waist of men, who aren’t lacking the will to build themselves
a home in the afterworld—
dying misses the metabolism of violence.
dying forgets the homeostasis of sloth,
who feels the anthropocene with each bent limb.
since time is his & our restlessness, though endless,
the lake of our vitality freezes & we’d put on our skates,
to carve into lattice with figure-eights—
for however long it takes wintry mix to broadleaf,
you owe the perception of chains a reprieve.
v.
you go buy cigarettes at the convenience store at the end
of the causeway, rising over oyster beds.
cattails emerge around the bend—
to isla flamenco— sputtering
wet with rain. i am but
one drink into
the gale &
he wins.
—
Zixiang Zhang (he/him/his) has poems published or forthcoming in Hanging Loose, Northwest Press, Consilience, Pensive, Pedestal, and others. He holds a degree in geology from Stanford University. Once, he published a study on brachiopods in the journal Paleobiology. Now, he teaches Earth science at a small high school in NYC and enjoys growing succulents, erging, sunbathing, and sundry. He may be active @zzverse.
