Three Poems

Landscape at Gennevilliers

In the field where the ordinary gets reincarnated,
I keep scraping the smoke into what limits me.

This isn’t my intention, but it draws me near
the coercive quality of smoke,

so feels like another charm on the pier
that gladdens one through life.

In this way I achieve a spouse and a hut,
and can go naked to visit the fridge.

The field is oil-paint of course with flies stuck in it.
Eventually, it becomes a mud pit the size of Texas,

which then is optimized for production of dirt oysters.
In the hut we peel our clothes

and think we’re sewing the world back together.
In the field we’re flies stuck in oil.

In the Country After Lunch

It’s summer, Suckers, and each grape warps
while here I hide in the house hiccup,

where we thump out the same pleasantries twice.
You say, What’s wrong? I say, What’s up?

Come afternoon, we melt like paperwork,
our perfect way of thinking something else.

Electrocuted cattails, for instance;
whether or how to ford one’s life.

Then go on, go on, uncounted.
Be like the scam of beauty,

a lemon unsliced,
a good neighbor to yourself.

The floor, how it floors you,
how it reaches up to roast your feet.

I get to be this cloud because this is my porch.
I’m able to say this is cloud enough.

Here, in the next episode.

It seems to me this will sell
and that is all I care about.

Image May Contain:

Universe, Space, Comet, 
Outer Space, or Planet. 

This string-like metonymy to suggest

how an ice cube might exist.
And the language’s promise to shoot that gap: 

Businessmen given 
businessmen enough, 
given businessman haircuts.

*

How it feels on my forehead
like orange oil on a finger.

The provincial nincompoop’s teal shorts. 
A nod beyond class annoyance.

So that the morning gets a second chance—
Morning glory. Glory morning.

Molecule across the smartboard of the living
in the emergency of living. 

Watermelon grown.
Some tragedy inflated farce.

*

Holiday, heart monitor, half-fogged 
magic 
leaking everywhere. 

Month the door shuts well.
Gator in Chicago pond.

*

And what happens 
already happened
by the time I think.

The creeping installment,
gigantic once I’m torn into it.

Night pulled up like an onion.
At any rate, yours.

Yours, in the thrill of misgiving.
Yours, in frustrated lamp light.

Ain’t doing nothing.
A fruit close up.

∩

Jack Christian is the author of the new chapbook The Road from Versailles to Saint-Germain, from Factory Hollow Press. He writes goofy reviews about eating and drinking in Minneapolis on his substack Day Dates.