Excerpt:
Alien year
I had it written down that meaning
cannot pre-exist operation.
And reading it again I mapped a shift
in my intent
to be ungovernable,
how a diachronic relic
cannot exist without its archive,
and how the objects making us afraid emerge
historically,
an open concatenation of ‘and and and.’
Most things are easy to find here;
I can make out one
or two fences in the dark, a long
way out toward linked
estuaries, clean and sparsely
furnished ranch houses. Yet,
where are the filters and grids that permit
human organs to be sensitive?
That interests me.
In a year of zealotry
like this one,
seasons can be harmed simply
by wearing them. Thus, rain is not
a punishment but a falling armored
into spring, rough
and wetted to the verge.
Louise Akers is a poet living in Queens, NY. They earned their MFA from Brown University in May of 2018, and received the Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop Prize for Innovative Writing in 2017 and the Confrontation Poetry Prize in 2019. Louise’s work can be found in the Berkeley Poetry Review, MIDTERM, Confrontation Magazine, Bat City Review, Fugue Journal, bæst journal, and elsewhere.
