iPOEM
kate schapira
The Field Museum
I do my dear I do I do make heavy weather of it. Iran’s nuclear program rings from the TV where we stop for coffee and water. The ringing rises. Line lengthens. In the field we rise as interruptions. Eat a doomed sausage, drink a doomed lemonade. We are the holotype of a hairy mass with mouths, super-into the lake-edge, perceivers of the world’s sounds. I swear I don’t think, “Good thing we’ll be able to see models of plants when there are no more plants.” I swear the picture of me in front of a wall of blownglass diatoms, smiling fit to break my face, isn’t faked. Deep in time a non-water way to reproduce floats into forced perspective. Raises up aggregate, simple and multiple fruits, people to hover later. Out of the wind, a stamen and its sliced-up self so we can see how it works. How its fertile work reaches for the same things beyond glass. The world wants more seeds to pop out and explain themselves, turning and being dawned on. It’s just as stupid to say “I want” as “the world wants”. I think about the damage all the time. Floweret-shaped 3-D hole where we drop out. Thinking I should’ve taken better notes the green barbs magnify. And so with the ovule, patience, red streak. Two wowed people in mahogany dark erased to clear the field. You said, “I’m like in tears.” You touched something—petrified wood, my notes say. The cost of being replaced with stone is time. I want you to know what we looked like and what we looked at when we were alive. You, the flower that can’t yet look back. The world, the staple grain.
Kate Schapira is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Soft Place (Horse Less Press). Her eighth chapbook, The Ground /The Pass / The Wave, is forthcoming this summer from Grey Book Press. She lives in Providence, where she teaches writing and co-runs the Publicly Complex Reading Series.