FOUR POEMS by RYAN COOK
10 Reasons to Be Against List Poems
PRIDEPOEM
I want as many people to be enamored
with me as possible before I step
into traffic. Happy
pride I say to myself
next to the all-gender
rest-room in the McDonald’s.
You are here to ruin
my night, aren’t you? And
on Grimace’s birthday, no less.
Burn Book
And at some point cliches
will end up speaking o-
ver themselves and the sand
will commence its thrashing
into flesh along the
shoreline. I am worried
about people finding
my journal, or my blogs,
and seeing how terri-
ble I am. My bubble-
gum diary with a
locket left on the right
hand side of the uptown
F. Dave told me that Teddy
B found and burned each co
py of his first thesis
in order to erase
his bad poetry. His
cringe contingent on ink,
paper, and carbon. Mine
is stored in a secure
warehouse in Califor-
nia, where servos whir
like lonely cats. Here kit-
ty kitty.
My Other Car Is a Poem
Or a random as-
sorment of cars, each
non euclidean
and wriggling. My
other poem is
a punch buggy *punch*
My other punch is
a litter of cars
driving over your
cheek, picking up car-
pooling microbes, hear
how they purrrrr. My ot-
her purr is an ex-
haust pipe spurting waves
of shock into traffic.
My other traffic
is sustained through more
traffic—reaching its
apex on the high-
way where everyone
slowed down to look at
the carnage but it was
just negative cap-
ability. My
other highway is
a sentence riddled
with rush job mistakes
and carcasses of
deer that were just try-
ing to check for gram
mar. My other sen-
tence is grammatic-
ally correct in that it
gets me to where I
need to go. My old radio
tells me of atro-
cities that I bare-
ly comprehend. My
other comprehen
sion is a fast pass
that I hold up to the
top right corner of horiz
on.
Ryan Cook (they/them) is a Brooklyn-based genderqueer poet and performer. An MFA candidate in poetry at Columbia, they have been awarded the teaching fellowship. Their work specializes in queer mythologies, digital cultures, and curses, and has been published in Thimble Lit Mag, Iterant, No Dear Mag, the Poetry Project’s Footnotes Series, Hot Pink Mag, and the Nightboat Blog. They also host events at McNally Jackson Bookstore, as well as work as a program associate for The Flow Chart Foundation. Along with Aiden Farell, they co-host the “Unnamed Reading Series” that features artists from all over New York City. You can follow them at @ryan_patrick_cook.