FOUR POEMS by NOAH POWERS
In A Major Discovery, Scientists Say Space-Time Churns Like A Choppy Sea
Call me fucking Ishmael.
I’m taming those waves, brother, let me start there.
If the Titanic was a massive stain on the efforts of man
against Space-Time, then I’m OxiClean, by god.
Let me clarify my intentions: I’m going to sink a hook
into the sea of Space-Time to pierce its septum.
I’ll dye its hair bleach blonde, closer to the sand
it rubs against like a lover than the foamy whitecaps
that do the rubbing. I’ll take it to the highest point in my hometown
and show it how the lights spread out wide, far, beautiful.
I would call Space-Time beautiful. I would!
I would tell it that I churn in my sleep,
so we aren’t so different if you think about it.
Let it know how far we have come over here, on land,
how you can be churny or be choppy and, if you’re lucky,
they won’t stone you in 4 or 5 of the states. Be grateful!
Its choppiness can be attributed to everyone fearing its passing by.
That’s understandable—hate to see you leave, love to watch you go!
That’s been my experience with Space-Time.
I’ve spent many moments not appreciating my space nor my time
on this green, green earth. It is only right that I lift my sails
and let the gusts carry me into Space-Time’s big blue heart
like one of those red-pink love tunnels with the swan boats.
I see Space-Time as a man, as the father I never had, but not
quite, maybe as a husband, a strong lover who wraps his arms
around me, keeps me safe from the passing of my life.
I am making a whole lot of assumptions but Space-Time tells me
my body and my words will be forgotten anyways.
There is comfort in the warmth of certainty, of the knowing
that eternal everything but what I am. I take a blanket, a bottle of wine
to see Space-Time on its miraculous shores.
Space-Time’s septum piercing glints in the bald-faced, cloudless sun.
I tell it how I came out this way to tame it,
but instead watched it grow more wild, unruly.
It churns relentlessly, and I know this is how Odysseus felt
gazing upon Charybdis—love and fear so intertwined
as to form a hybridized feeling, something humans know
but cannot explain in the limitations of language.
Space-Time knows what I’m saying, though,
and wraps its inexplicably soft self around my vessel, then my flesh.
Upon Realizing My Home Does Not Love Me
The bare branches sink further
into the black the cat stands on
its hind legs and calls out to the heavens
for help, help! is met with a sock
full of quarters, less than no sunshine,
a giant pyramid sits in the distance
like an empty plate on a table no one
is willing to clear there are some things
that last forever almost none of them should
we’re talking memories of death, microplastics,
the blackness of space, let’s return to that
incorrigible existence we run from every day
like antelopes on the savannah, are they on the savannah?
I’m not 100% sure but I wish I was in Savannah,
I wish I could quit my job and move to Savannah, GA
and spend my days poor, hot, near the ocean
in a town old and haunted as my family’s collective consciousness
and I could be happy I could be happy—
oh, maybe I will find myself beautiful, interesting, surprising
along the way and I will establish some sense of permanent self
maybe in Kentucky maybe in somewhere new
if not unimpressive maybe I will sing
maybe I will open the flesh of my chest
and let the music box crank itself and the notes
will glide out of my rib cage and into hot Southern humidity
and I will drink the water out of the air and I will crawl
inside the blanket of sunshine and fall asleep on the beach
and let the crabs collect my skin and leave me
to be me to be me to be me.
Poem About Never Dying, Not Even Once
For EThere is always a way, I’ve told you haven’t I
I must have told you about the jellyfish—
immortal as Stevie Nicks and brainless like me,
the jellyfish that reverses life to keep it going,
a conundrum I’m still swirling in, Jupiter’s big ole eye
and my one good eye meeting in gropey dark
to establish fine rules regarding which fruit conglomerates kill,
which only dream to. The jellyfish! Oh, yes, it makes itself a child
again to avoid taxes, Tinder, perhaps, too, the sweaty waiting-in-line
when every choice is not a ghost but a party size bag
of shoulder chips (uninspiringly). I daydream about everything
learning to reset itself. We’re in a park
and the tree for shade poofs, sunlight invades
the absence, an acorn fills the space. Or, hear me out,
I’m telling you about discovering a familial link
between loneliness and oxygen when I become a smiling lump
of baby. Wouldn’t that be some shit? I cannot stop
considering the size of the stage, though it makes my knees
ear-infected chairs and my skin sprinklers the situational self.
Who am I to reject the golden brick road’s ring-in-hand approach—
whatever that means. You could make sense of two clouds
holding hands but never walking down the aisle.
You seem to know all of it, and then some,
your eyes two disco ball pinatas stuffed with museums,
jars of paint, all of my poems and yours.
This is about security; you know all the passcodes.
It’s also about admiration for your flower petal ears
inscribed with Neil Young’s entire catalog
and a lot of what’s the word I mean conversation.
I learned breathlessness interviewing geese
who fly, suitless, into space without a lick of gasoline
nor a hope of ever coming home.
Yet they do, over and over and over, just as we
watch the moon to see if it cares how full we are,
if we had seconds or left a little of tonight to fate.
I know time is a carrot on a stick but who holds the stick
is what we spend our tokens on. I know the walls
grow in then out like a lung and I don’t feel safety
without a pin poked in my cushion. I’m stuffing
my pockets with the seconds we share
before the sun explodes or, more statistically,
an anvil falls upon me. There is too much fine china,
not enough open-heart surgery. I’ve told you this before.
It’s nothing new, my fear of sunrises and red curtains
swooping down in an avalanche of ending.
After buying a leash for my heart,
I try to teach you what I know about love
but speech is no postal service and it’s lost
in the comforts of this window-side table
inside of a fox. I work to not forget
the silence we break in two though I’ve never held
sand in hand for long. What I want to tell you is:
I’ll keep you alive even if your skeleton becomes a cowboy.
For now, I bend my head to the glow
beneath the door because it informs me you are alive,
well, still entrenched beside me. It’s good to know
the stopwatch in my hand can only go up
and this specifically came without an expiry date
and, despite the evidence, we may be immortal.
Kentucky Man, 23, Contemplates Life At A Lake
He sits on a log and stares into the murky blue waters of a lake,
unsure if it’s a lake he sees or the end of an ocean
cut off just behind the trees.
He gets nervous thinking about this.
He remembers how nervous he felt
when he fell in love and the sidewalk cracked
wide open, right where he was walking,
and he fell down the world’s longest plastic slide
straight into another reality, one without his sweetheart,
one full of gray, grey, all the colorless colors, in fact,
and birds that, instead of singing, rang cold, lifeless alarms
every single morning, so that he could not sleep,
though he’d forgotten what sleeping was like in his fall and
instead would curl his fists into little balls and daydream
about knocking out the moon’s pearly whites, which,
as it turns out, just means knocking the socks off
the first vision of love that follows him down the slide
and into eternity. Who’d have thought! He sure didn’t
as he slipped and sloped and left behind everything
in an accidental leap of faith (no pun intended unless
it was put there by the same Power (yes, capital P)
that put into existence the smell of roses and,
stress on the and, please, the first sip of water
after the mouth becomes it’s own zip-coded desert
overnight) which led him to this moment, this
sliver of time that he may call his own, and this
is what makes him so nervous. He has never owned,
always rented, always shifted his time from one job
to a passing stranger to a stray cat to the woman he left
behind whose name is more an old receipt than a wax stamp,
never holding more than sandwich or pair of keys in his hand
to call his, you know, to lay claim to with the same confidence
as a colonizer planting a flag on someone else’s land, not
the same energy, just the same gravity-defying confidence
that seeps through the pores in a goo slightly thicker than
sweat (if it makes you feel icky, it hit the spot). But
the moment loses its value so fast, so fast indeed! He sits
on a colorless log and stares out at gray trees and gray water
and no one ever comes down the slide, no one ever
does, and he sits alone, in silence besides the
alarmy chatter of the birds above. He sits there
and reflects on the life he’s lived and decides
to make a change, a change that starts with a slide
into something uncomfortable and ends with
a climb into something beautiful, and wouldn’t we
all like images to go with those somethings, huh?
He pops out at the top of the slide like a newborn,
plops himself down on the ground in excited excitement,
appreciates a blue sky for the second time in his years,
feels his heart swoon at the sight of a song drifting
through warm afternoon air straight into his
newly appreciative ears, he sits there and wonders
why he ever felt nervous in the first place when he could
be part of the world— the whole world! He could be a puzzle
piece crucial to the whole thing, and he realizes this while
he forgets more of who he used to be, while he walks
to a lake that feels important in the way that one picks
up their phone for a good reason only to not recall what,
until minutes later, aha! Except he does not aha! this time,
he sits on a log and stares into the murky blue waters
of a lake, feeling nervous about the state of the lake
(is it a lake or the end of an ocean?) but looking at himself
in the mirrory water, and smiling, sighing and smiling.
Noah Powers (he/him) is a queer Southerner writing poems and teaching high school English in Kentucky. He has been published in Rejection Letters and Autofocus. He can be found on Twitter @_noahpowers.