​01-08-2024

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Michael Trussler​

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USUALLY WHEN

 

foreign material is transplanted into tissue, be it on Sunday or

inside the epipelagic zone a kind of crime has already . . .

 

Everyone knows our varying strengths require competing

nude selfies and we’re not at all in this together . . .

 

Long believed lost forever, A.I. is honestly sorry to bother

viewers, but how do you care for wintry truth-telling . . .

 

When even the oldest are still a talent to watch after all

                                  these predatory

 

years, each of everybody is

a recovering childhood addict—

 

JUBILATE

 

1.

 

A voice told me, look you’re here entirely because of me—

 

 

2.

 

Not always easy to overcome,

                                                                                   the origins of Collective Memory

can be traced back to the final

                                                                                   Bronze age, the Whitechapel

Fatberg and everything that helped 

                                                                                   keep Jesus awake in church—

 

 

3.

 

Another voice said listen you don’t

                                                                                    you still don’t . . . it’s not

these herds of digital dead people

                                                                                    people-watching it’s not

the crowdfunded vigilantes: it’s

                                                                                    that something . . . that original

astonishment that can’t be walked

                                                                                    away from — the furies, the furies

                                    

                                              cross-pollinating

 

the wilderness inside bored toddlers

                                                                                   the moment in which the patient

 

 

remembers the mother-of-pearl cliffs of sunlight

                                                                                   asleep on a grandmother’s bathroom floor—

 

 

4.

 

Each of us an unlocked cabinet

                                                                                   of unfed mountain inside

the cage of ribs that sings so.

                                                                                    Sings so. 

 

 

UNDETTERED BY...

 

space trash spinning way upstairs in

the Low Earth orbit, today’s newest

 

cloud is pre. Pre-oneiric. Pre-

historic. Is the colour

of stingray skin, is

mostly there

to reassemble

                      the evaporating water

ghosts, not the sky’s dome-made-tangerine

from fires lost at sea. New as

 

a spray-on condom, and alone as a child

struggling to draw an octopus, the cloud’s

 

a shambolic rehearsal, a violet

shroud with legacies

                                  yet to learn—

 

What’s loose, what’s loose, what—

​

Note:

The notion of the “spray-on condoms” is Jan Vinzens Krause’s, and is mentioned in the Year in Ideas 2008, The New York Times Magazine.

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-from Realia, selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Fall 2024 Guest Editor, Hollay Ghadery​

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MICHAEL TRUSSLER writes poetry, short stories, essays, and creative non-fiction. He is also a photographer. He has published various books, and his prize-winning work has appeared in domestic and international anthologies and journals. He teaches English at the University of Regina.