Knar Gavin: After Meriye B. Ouzounian

O, captains of infamy, again 

you’ve battered and eaten the world. 

Borges had it almost right. Every cata

clysm happens for the first time, 

and in a wash that is infernal.

                         With fighting

fossil capitalism 

               there’ve been attempts — over the sink

               and under the moon, some white-lit

               trying, as if 

               to cleanse 

               buttered hands  

               with cold water.

Our bodies are shitting credit cards

               by the week, so plastiform is this life. 

Some things work themselves into you, 

               and that is the only getting them gone.

Where we might’ve broken bread

               or even 

broken it off with the land-swallowers

instead capital’s tyrant uncles drove

their straws beneath beautiful surfaces

to guzzle past and future all at once. 

When we think of tenure

we ought to think 

of the land, & 

of those who 

would hold

nothing 

back 

to get 

to a settled future. 

Catastrophe fills the scope, but my Armenian blood knows

brutality is as old as the fossil record. 

I remember my great, great

               grandfather, Krikor. Buried alive, but first

                         he put mud on our faces

                         so we wouldn’t look pretty. 

               I realize, now, that I am in the situation of communication 

where Krikor could not be.

 

The truth is 

in the pudding, 

& its still blood. Or, 

               the medium is

               the massage that

                              structure will have been.

Krikor, 

               he had pigeons

                                             he left all.

This full world is in flight for the stationed few. 

               O, Sinemas and, likewise, Pelosis and Kochs,

               O, Manchins — hot wives in cold houses

                              amidst this inferno 

                         of a near-future 4-degrees. 

I vow this: to cut the arms off every lifeboat. (1)

               To let them, all lovers of pigeons, survive the road out,

               to tear the fossil-hankering factory down, glitch

               the bone machine

                         with the incandescent power of those 

                                             neither wealthy nor insatiable 

               to wretch and howl the brute money men down.

Petes Buttigieg, Brians Deese: we’re coming.

               We’ve got mud on our faces 

and pigeon eyes in the millions.

We will not look pretty. 

               We will not back down.  

Wimmer of the 2022 William Carlos Williams Prize, University of Pennsylvania