Actually, I Want To Be A Regionalist Poet
a place that never smells good
the ease the fine ease the ease pleasant fair
nitrate haul
nothing miniaturistic about it
oh yknow it’s between
chicago minneapolis st. louis kansas city omaha
so much more mids than that
the glucose middletose
23 million hogs
they stiff their snouts to the center
much more accurate than you
headstands in savory mire
on my 10th birthday
i saw a bicyclist straw walked alive by a combine
evil folk physics
low pressure draft then winnowing maw bars
always reminded of that insipid meme
“don’t perceive me”
the phenomenology of it all goofed up
well actually eyeballs don’t decay
the sink the loam the grief
9 foot stalks fruiting pupils gaping
u. maydis galls out of my sockets
cyanophyta whisper kevin costner fun facts
between major suture lines
county lines like butchered fossa
concentrated animal feeding operations
condemned animal festering order
statue of general winfield scott made out of butter
their tongues settle
There Will Be Some Distressing Materials Forthcoming
you’re naked
setting on me
what desire what
might imagine grasp
the odds of you scavenging love
and contracting naegleriasis
from a nasal irrigator
are roughly equivalent
much to the displeasure of my
unincarnatable apertures
self-sacring esoterics keep trying
to sell me phlegmatic expressionist
portraits made with loam and thrush
and a set of kolinsky sable brushes
purchased for them by their fathers
as a christmas gift in 2019 their
fathers work honestly pretty
high up at metlife and they
must never tell anyone this but they
constantly envision how easy
it would be to
surely indie sleaze evidences
how there is no problem
of evil
only evil
the lyric the mouth sounds
i note denature i elide
the low toner the stanzas
i swallow i break unnature
the sertraline meter the 9am diet coke
i track face i type change
the dactylic growth the septic line
i open for i simultaneously submit
ergonomic unassigned office
collaboration ideacenter
filled with sputum
airbus a320 filled
with excelsome model
spreadsheeters and
they’re all reading
that frank o’hara poem
the one with the coffee and the
cigs and the hemicranious love
vitae sigil’d by syndica
lucrative neologisms
the monk who invented
the word “liminal”
in the dirt
you don't even fuckin
understand the
rotting he's onto
the most next shit
_____________
Jenkin Benson is a 2nd year PhD student at the University of Notre Dame. He principally studies the creative interchange between Welsh and Irish modernists. You can find links to his poetry here: https://www.chillsubs.com/user/siencynapbened
These poems were selected by Anthropocene guest editor Tom Branfoot
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