Once Upon a Time I Was

meow meow every year
till an unknown number of elders

possessed by some copacetic Chronic
earn some extra income to swim

in perfect ecstatic harmony with
a slow Saturday afternoon.

this plot of perseverance sprays
like pleasure boats across

inept domesticity. Obviously
being human, it is awkward.

Once upon a time, moving indefinitely
along an edge implied tiny

wild kittens escaping PBS
subsistence hunting

fear of radioactivity
flickering glandular affluence.

Ancient glaciers oozed light
through the general living room

of America, while an Amish person
in a dark moment considered

low-rise skinny jeans and a dolphin
escaped persecution to form

a unique but purely hypothetical
community full of frolic-like

empathetic aftersex plasma light.
These early bodies exploded

violently. In their wake
a vast overriding rule which

we felt as warmth and later
a junkie’s whisper-soft script

dealt with via white cats
behind wavy glass.

Snow on one side, the other
chopped up. Once upon a time

I was born in the ground.

Elisabeth Workman’s poems are as breathlessly glacial and surveillance-spooked as you can get while still breathing, walking slowly, and turning your face from the camera.

If you are in the vicinity of Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis next Saturday, the 27th, at 4PM, you can see her and her crew (e.g. I will be there, shouting from a hidden place) read poems and march around the lake while a New Orleans jazz band plays the strains of planetary exhaustion and a little joy, too. Join us?

Okay.

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