Poems
by KJ Hannah Greenberg
Wigglefloof
Insanely cute, furry face—all leaps, pounces,
Means of catching dust bunnies and fallen leaves,
Detritus beneath the dining table, beside homework.
Ever since you licked a paw atop our sofa, we
Melted, fawned over the quantity of kibble in your
Bowl, the freshness of your water, your pricey baubles.
Stinky litter box aside, your presence, akin to fine
Joaillerie, brightened our days, adorned our clothes,
Left traces on floors, furniture, also in our potted plants.
No spiritual possession, trance, dream, meditation,
Or empathy equaled your sensibility per sunny patches,
Soiled laundry, all manner of discarded cardboard boxes.
Fusty
Upon shredding otherwise stale, damp, stuffy fragments,
No thermochromic events occur. Neither dramatic color
Changes nor melted material get revealed by dissection.
Rather, knives craft striae, harm the wholeness of teeny,
Dank bits sentenced to impute fault, to blame otherwise
Nondescript clamminess. Still, sequestering moldering
Culls further rot, does nothing to help any preservation.
Long noosed ropes, such as riata, lariats, also lassos,
Conversely, catch instances of ignoble seisin. They
Offer attractive alternative to highway robbery, to
Putrefying frameworks. At times, external
Immorality, not decay, accounts for iniquity.
Sike
Yea, right. I was just kidding. Surely, you don’t take me seriously.
Everyone searches for copal, for lianas, and for parrots in cities. The
Prohibition wasn’t about alcohol. No one cares when hem lengths change.
Reframing nonhuman goings-on like the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion,
The rhetorical aftermath of in 1986, the Vietnam confrontation, and the appalling
Resolution of the AIDs epidemic doesn’t matter. Brinkmanship, pursuing dangerous
Policies, not heeding safety’s limits, rarely, if not fur-smothered, any more than family
Size, work/life balance, missing living wills, fastens contemporary “prisoners” to death.
We’ve long acknowledged the province of norms, values, and virtues as plentiful
Instances illustrating how attention gets couched in prescriptive, descriptive, other
Metalinguistic patois. Proof positive includes actions taken to audition responses to
Limited lexical strategies, consisting of qualifying possible “isms;” communicators’
Milieu, status mightn’t determine “lucidity,” transform understandings of words, acts,
Or meanings’ relationships, from ancient mythos to contemporary legends, recurrently.
Positive features inform moral excellence and nonexcellence, emphasize gradations of
Perfection. Rather than destroy full copses of trees, it’s better to plant distinct woodlands.
Weigh the similarity of coastal neuks & radiation patterns. It’s amazing
That similar oscillations heat tea or determine anchorage. For ornamental
Scurf, it’s how we upsell sundry pharmaceuticals to community consumers
Targes. We’ve realized, belatedly, that there’s no use separating glossology from
Social Studies; humanity’s history is summarized in sacred as well as secular texts.
No “pure” reading of our activities, as evidenced in words, can exist. Written artifacts,
Including transcripts of individuals’ thoughts and their thoughts on thoughts, are devoid
Of paralinguistic information. Most semantic reports cannot disclose “truth” before dying.
Few deuteragonists succeed in clying plots from heroes. Sooner, would-be
Story sappers resolve, usually, to build, then repair a tale’s ambit, to otherwise
Grasp humanity’s essence via literary expression, to not dispute feminism, rather
To enhance it de facto, to become sufficiently enlightened to profit from, to be distracted by
Teaching courses like “Women in Society.” If we try bedaubing gangways for sanguine people,
Scilicet, mysterious emotional displays flourish out of context in their public interactions.
Subsequently, clodhoppers may well engage in uncontrollable outbreaks of crying, laughing.
Sesquipedalian broadcastings, after all, are like phages—they infect and replicate repeatedly.
