Allison Cobb
You were born
after Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr’s
“Misanthropocene”
Oh dear, you were born
with that poison song singing
through your veins and you trail
a wide train
of war where you go: dial up
the chandelier, new
hurricanes swirl, step through the parting
doors into the drugstore, more big
-eyed children amassing at the border. I know
it’s not your fault as in
you killed them, you just
killed everything breathing, by you I mean
the sun lamps
we call our lives,
my friends, elegiac,
on auto correct, as they will
have been, having come
so late, after everything can’t stop
weeping at the gleaming apple
flagship. It’s a new mode of poetry
called West Melancholy. Google it,
click that link for a pair of lady feet
prancing around in strappy
red Nine
West “Melancholy” sandals to that
Robin Thicke good
girl beat. You know you
kind of want to buy them now,
they zip up the back, so hot
they’re sold out, they’re Greek
-ish, called “open-toed
caged booties.” What is
melancholy but the global
brand rapture, the shining
spew of song from the poison
entrails of all my heroes, who are
you guys—my friends, alive
and in love
with nothing
but partying
at this funeral
for the eighties
glam bands and their simplistic
misogyny, yes, every rose
has its thorn just like every cowboy
sings his sad, sad song
of the good old days
of gunfire
in utero. Once born
in war you have
to live there. But we, me and my
spirit slut shoes, just pretend
we can keep on bleeding
these horseshoe crabs
of their primordial blue blood.
You read about that on I Fucking
Love Science right? They’re not crabs
at all, but ancient pre-dinosaur sea
spiders, and their blood can detect
even the tiniest trace of evil
microbe invaders on that plastic
apparatus about to be inserted
in your body: pacemaker,
false boobs, hernia net,
hypodermic.
They come to breed
in shallow seas each spring
in the bay of Delaware, named for the Lord
De la Warr. So the crabs crowd up
in the bay to breed beneath the new
and full moons in the months of May and June,
and the watermen--
the watermen wade in, grab them by the shell
and toss them on trucks
to a lab where lab
people strap them to a steel table, insert a needle
to the heart, drain 30% of the blood,
and send them back to the water of the war. One quart
goes for $15k. It seems fake
but it’s
real like the teenage
girl I once saw at the national
zoo in Washington, pointing
at every sad skin sack in its
bootie cage, pronouncing
“that’s fake,” a word of London gang
slang from when to fake
a man out and out meant
to hurt him
all the way up
to dead, as my dad
used to say quoting the Public
Service Ad on TV about downed
power lines in the garden of earthly Lost
Almost. Standing up on a bluff
with Lucretius watching the shipwreck
rising up toward us. Here it comes,
my friends. I spit
on poetry with Epicurus, in the hope
of being spit on
in return. I did not mean for this to be a poem
about horseshoe crabs and caged booties, but now I’ve watched
that 20 seconds on Youtube of feet
twirling slowly over and over, ads for sad
high heels keep showing up in my Face
-book feed. Facebook feed — which at the root
means “nourish
the appearance of the tree,” and I could unfold that
one for a while, but I can’t stop thinking
of that water
-man in the lo-res
Nature video on my screen, holding
the ancient pre-dinosaur sea spider to his face
saying “See?
They’re harmless,” as with its claws it
gently probes his cheeks.
He speaks as a fisherman of the privilege
to return his prey, but in fact
it’s not clear how many survive the bleeding
and whether it reduces spawning, and there’s a whole
other story here about a bird called the red knot
that seems to be going extinct that makes one of the longest
migrations of any creature, from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic, and relies
on the greenish strings of horseshoe crab eggs clotted up on the shore at just
this time for fuel to complete its journey, though I think the video
only features the bird because horseshoe crabs are not
filled with personality though they do have ten eyes, and the industry
compares the crabs to humans donating blood but of course
the crabs are forced, and Allison
Argo the filmmaker and narrator intones “There is hardly
a person alive
who does not owe thanks
to the horseshoe crab,” but I wonder about all the people
alive on earth who never get treated with a specialty
pharmaceutical through an intravenous drip, and I remember the trips
we took to the Delaware shore without ever knowing about the tiny
horseshoe crab larva hopping along the sand floor and the many trips
I took to the emergency room for a time and the brownish-purple
IV bruises up my hands and arms, and the horseshoe crab I saw
washed up near the East River once but didn’t think much about it. I meant
to end this poem with a tight
metaphor about the band Poison from the eighties and how
in retrospect that time with its Cold
War, which literally nourished me, and the men
in makeup on my bedroom wall seems sort of
innocent now and that maybe more insidious forms of poison have invaded all of us
alive on the planet, plant,
human, and animal, and one poison is how we know we kind of want that
melancholy that lets we who are wealthy in the West
relax into our sadness about the end
of all the stuff we destroyed without knowing or trying, that clipped and clever
cynicism that is a kind of rubbernecking for we who are well
-off, what the poet and scholar Chris Nealon in his essay “Infinity
for Marxists” calls masochistic species
-shame.
So I am failing
at this poem. But maybe failure
is a good place to dwell. Come in
under the shadow of this blood
red rock of the white man’s
bank. I can show you how the old
war froze
in place like two gunfighters facing off
forever, hands on holsters, but in this case it’s two nations bristling
with missiles still
on hair
-trigger, high alert—set to launch
in fifteen minutes or less at all of them and
all of us. My dears, I can show you fear
in approximately three thousand ninety-seven war
-heads set on missiles, how the practice of bombing
regular people from the air evolved out of World War I through the British
“policing” Iraqis with bombs in the 1920s, how your shadow falls
behind you and rises to meet you, and you have never
breathed any other air
but this war. The crabs know this too,
in their way, and the zoos with their relic
masticators and the sad
sad sandal stitchers. There is
no other poem but this one, a heap
of broken images where the sun beats
on the dead trees and the dry stone gives no sound of water, only
failure, from Latin “to trip,
dupe, deceive.” Like fake. Is there no
other ending but this one, the fucked up fail
of this war
way of being in the world? How should I know? I’m not
your sibyl
hanging out in a jar. We
all will be the ones
to make that call—we
the targets, we the people
with our fingers on the trigger.
We the late--
the start
Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press) about her hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Green-Wood (Factory School) about a nineteenth-century cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The New York Times called Green-Wood “a gorgeous, subtle, idiosyncratic gem.” She is a 2015 Djerassi Resident Artist; a 2014 Playa Resident Artist; received a 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship award from the Oregon Arts Commission; and was a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. She works for the Environmental Defense Fundand lives in Portland, Oregon.
You were born
after Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr’s
“Misanthropocene”
Oh dear, you were born
with that poison song singing
through your veins and you trail
a wide train
of war where you go: dial up
the chandelier, new
hurricanes swirl, step through the parting
doors into the drugstore, more big
-eyed children amassing at the border. I know
it’s not your fault as in
you killed them, you just
killed everything breathing, by you I mean
the sun lamps
we call our lives,
my friends, elegiac,
on auto correct, as they will
have been, having come
so late, after everything can’t stop
weeping at the gleaming apple
flagship. It’s a new mode of poetry
called West Melancholy. Google it,
click that link for a pair of lady feet
prancing around in strappy
red Nine
West “Melancholy” sandals to that
Robin Thicke good
girl beat. You know you
kind of want to buy them now,
they zip up the back, so hot
they’re sold out, they’re Greek
-ish, called “open-toed
caged booties.” What is
melancholy but the global
brand rapture, the shining
spew of song from the poison
entrails of all my heroes, who are
you guys—my friends, alive
and in love
with nothing
but partying
at this funeral
for the eighties
glam bands and their simplistic
misogyny, yes, every rose
has its thorn just like every cowboy
sings his sad, sad song
of the good old days
of gunfire
in utero. Once born
in war you have
to live there. But we, me and my
spirit slut shoes, just pretend
we can keep on bleeding
these horseshoe crabs
of their primordial blue blood.
You read about that on I Fucking
Love Science right? They’re not crabs
at all, but ancient pre-dinosaur sea
spiders, and their blood can detect
even the tiniest trace of evil
microbe invaders on that plastic
apparatus about to be inserted
in your body: pacemaker,
false boobs, hernia net,
hypodermic.
They come to breed
in shallow seas each spring
in the bay of Delaware, named for the Lord
De la Warr. So the crabs crowd up
in the bay to breed beneath the new
and full moons in the months of May and June,
and the watermen--
the watermen wade in, grab them by the shell
and toss them on trucks
to a lab where lab
people strap them to a steel table, insert a needle
to the heart, drain 30% of the blood,
and send them back to the water of the war. One quart
goes for $15k. It seems fake
but it’s
real like the teenage
girl I once saw at the national
zoo in Washington, pointing
at every sad skin sack in its
bootie cage, pronouncing
“that’s fake,” a word of London gang
slang from when to fake
a man out and out meant
to hurt him
all the way up
to dead, as my dad
used to say quoting the Public
Service Ad on TV about downed
power lines in the garden of earthly Lost
Almost. Standing up on a bluff
with Lucretius watching the shipwreck
rising up toward us. Here it comes,
my friends. I spit
on poetry with Epicurus, in the hope
of being spit on
in return. I did not mean for this to be a poem
about horseshoe crabs and caged booties, but now I’ve watched
that 20 seconds on Youtube of feet
twirling slowly over and over, ads for sad
high heels keep showing up in my Face
-book feed. Facebook feed — which at the root
means “nourish
the appearance of the tree,” and I could unfold that
one for a while, but I can’t stop thinking
of that water
-man in the lo-res
Nature video on my screen, holding
the ancient pre-dinosaur sea spider to his face
saying “See?
They’re harmless,” as with its claws it
gently probes his cheeks.
He speaks as a fisherman of the privilege
to return his prey, but in fact
it’s not clear how many survive the bleeding
and whether it reduces spawning, and there’s a whole
other story here about a bird called the red knot
that seems to be going extinct that makes one of the longest
migrations of any creature, from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic, and relies
on the greenish strings of horseshoe crab eggs clotted up on the shore at just
this time for fuel to complete its journey, though I think the video
only features the bird because horseshoe crabs are not
filled with personality though they do have ten eyes, and the industry
compares the crabs to humans donating blood but of course
the crabs are forced, and Allison
Argo the filmmaker and narrator intones “There is hardly
a person alive
who does not owe thanks
to the horseshoe crab,” but I wonder about all the people
alive on earth who never get treated with a specialty
pharmaceutical through an intravenous drip, and I remember the trips
we took to the Delaware shore without ever knowing about the tiny
horseshoe crab larva hopping along the sand floor and the many trips
I took to the emergency room for a time and the brownish-purple
IV bruises up my hands and arms, and the horseshoe crab I saw
washed up near the East River once but didn’t think much about it. I meant
to end this poem with a tight
metaphor about the band Poison from the eighties and how
in retrospect that time with its Cold
War, which literally nourished me, and the men
in makeup on my bedroom wall seems sort of
innocent now and that maybe more insidious forms of poison have invaded all of us
alive on the planet, plant,
human, and animal, and one poison is how we know we kind of want that
melancholy that lets we who are wealthy in the West
relax into our sadness about the end
of all the stuff we destroyed without knowing or trying, that clipped and clever
cynicism that is a kind of rubbernecking for we who are well
-off, what the poet and scholar Chris Nealon in his essay “Infinity
for Marxists” calls masochistic species
-shame.
So I am failing
at this poem. But maybe failure
is a good place to dwell. Come in
under the shadow of this blood
red rock of the white man’s
bank. I can show you how the old
war froze
in place like two gunfighters facing off
forever, hands on holsters, but in this case it’s two nations bristling
with missiles still
on hair
-trigger, high alert—set to launch
in fifteen minutes or less at all of them and
all of us. My dears, I can show you fear
in approximately three thousand ninety-seven war
-heads set on missiles, how the practice of bombing
regular people from the air evolved out of World War I through the British
“policing” Iraqis with bombs in the 1920s, how your shadow falls
behind you and rises to meet you, and you have never
breathed any other air
but this war. The crabs know this too,
in their way, and the zoos with their relic
masticators and the sad
sad sandal stitchers. There is
no other poem but this one, a heap
of broken images where the sun beats
on the dead trees and the dry stone gives no sound of water, only
failure, from Latin “to trip,
dupe, deceive.” Like fake. Is there no
other ending but this one, the fucked up fail
of this war
way of being in the world? How should I know? I’m not
your sibyl
hanging out in a jar. We
all will be the ones
to make that call—we
the targets, we the people
with our fingers on the trigger.
We the late--
the start
Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press) about her hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Green-Wood (Factory School) about a nineteenth-century cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The New York Times called Green-Wood “a gorgeous, subtle, idiosyncratic gem.” She is a 2015 Djerassi Resident Artist; a 2014 Playa Resident Artist; received a 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship award from the Oregon Arts Commission; and was a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. She works for the Environmental Defense Fundand lives in Portland, Oregon.