ANNE
BOYER
DOMESTIC
Not the context for respirators. Not the ear for severe
exposure. Not the comb for adjacent
areas.
Not the streetlamp for large rubber gloves.
Not bag
your own. The checker
should lay his furrow: a tiff,
a tangent, the red
bananas, the sleeves made up with safety
pins. Surfaces should
be worn. Lamps should smolder.
Dahlias do bloom like tumors. The birds do rise
like bombs. Context a pink splinter: unfinished floor,
bean leaf beetle,
hapless konza-vanicus. Certain
volatiles.
Not the lie for that blue armchair.
There is a bed, but it won’t go through the door.
Not stoutnight. Not fortnight, this grim for border or hedge.
SCIENCE
Method being what I remember about Science:
method and the great ache
it gave me.
Well-lit, unexceptional, balancing on its
head
a sober Petri,
Science made one best
for children and the angular.
I always wanted that
temper. I wanted it:
tiny-tracked, stubborn, thing-y.
First hypothesis under me, sound as wood,
but its near proof
wrenched my investigation.
I mussed the deciduous and coniferous.
Then for me or to fuck-me-off Science brazened
out medicinal horse
tails, algae on Plutonic
rivers, tepid stumps. It
served micro animals
and tendrils that
could put off Mendel. Undone
with decorum, Science
wouldn't slow for sonnet
or sex or fender
stacks: and a cross
lover laughed whiskey at
its oncoming.
I subdued it to the ache. I secretly still
want
its thing-ness. Its
thing-ness could steady me:
a wanter, wanting taxonomy, tendrils and 173
shades of peas. Almost
indebted, but not in debt:
its solidity and its
assuredness ached mammoth.
All the not-things had to spin to still the
ache.