Freaked ivy | of the petronauts also brier on
Henderson Island | BOPPs with organs | saving
& thrift would be the worst form of citizenship today | plastic scrap is not waste | it’s raining
catastrophes & doilies | everything flows | how much CO2 can a
poem puddle? | 18 tonnes of plastic | neatherds | pool pure products of a merry
go round | laminate crabs | corpseing on slow currents | thick sinks | quelch
pressure | polymer passports | let’s use the word plastics with pride! |
now beautiful plants…last forever thanks to Anode Plastisols |
clear morass, fulcrum soon | pacific soupy melting pot | the best things in life come in cellophane | resin citizenship | red
skyscraper at nimbus, shibboleth’s delusion; red skyscraper in mortar,
shibboleth’s warrior |
water
in the Capitol | camels graze on grass | grain grows in the
north | buffering oceans | melt floods a quarter of
Florida & Louisiana |sea smog pasta rolls | albatrosses gobble
fush pens | human beans are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment | the rheology of
poetry | winters were harder when they were boys | catepillers
digest plastic bags to get out | Grandpa wasn’t kidding | weathernauts
claim the world…is growing warmer |
dust has a…cooling effect | those easily affected by sudden climate change | crab
& oyster larvae consume & excrete microplastics |We
have a mess on our hands
is another way of saying a bad accident
|
cannot do better than take Baxter's Lung Preserver as a safe precaution
against coughs & cold | a billion people starving | it’s
not merely | of academic interest | circumpolar
vortex the planet’s overall albedo | The raisin in Spain stays
mainly in the plantain! |
it’s
a straitjacket in a teardrop | coral found in rocks in Greenland suggests it
must have once been warm | the real global temperature is expected to rise
by 7.36 degrees celcius | The say every woman finds her master | what is
survival in a heat wave? | every coachman has a singer lisp |The girls
can flirt and other queer things can do | the power of the gasoline car is
its sex | a circumscribed radius | motorised femininity is electric | a scientific
perambulator | throw cedar to the wine |a fairyland-weaver frigate has
their headdress in the clowns |as a mayoress of fairway | No license
should be granted to anyone under eighteen…and never to a woman, unless,
possibly, for a car driven by electric power | it’s the cameraman before the
stranger | I’ve always
desired to drive a roadster | ceci n’est pas une |
Orchid Tierney is
from New Zealand/Aotearoa/Philadelphia. Her chapbooks include Brachiation
(Dunedin: GumTree Press, 2012) and The World in Small Parts (Chicago:
Dancing Girl Press, 2012), and a full length sound translation of the Book of
Margery Kempe, Earsay (TrollThread, 2016). She co-edits Supplement,
an annual anthology on Philadelphia writing.
This
sequence of poems comes from a work-in-progress, exploring the entanglements of
fossil fuels, PA fracking, oceanic chemistry, Island rights, climate change,
human and nonhuman carbon-based cosmonauts as seen through my misreadings,
malapropisms, misidentifications and misseeings, amplified by the Nu Zild
accent in a variety of textual sources to find vocabularies to verbify slow
ecological violence into new speeds, to create textual gyres that mimic the new
soups/islands in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The above sequence contains
original language patched with phrases from news reports, advertisements, and
Oulipo’d weather oriented cliches.