Absence spares no one.
Birth
keeps a record
of who
birth skipped.
Some history: The baby had heard of a quiet glacier searching Ohio for the lost belly button of nothing and so left us in God, the capital of Death.
Mom I am the third boy to finish my wolf. Mom the baby likes you when you’re eating. Mom the snow has picked the water clean. Mom Ohio. In the food you couldn’t help.
Its favorite movie is the wind. Its mother found its father waiting for a cat to die.
Is there no one to hold its mouth?
Even god is afraid of sex.
On tv, the baby guards a salt lick while wearing the crown of thorns as a belt. Outside the tv, a random sister pulls her thumbnail loose and a paper doll starts to breathe. The fish watches all of it through a hole in the fish.
the skull of a child who can’t swim. whose friends
tried.
–
a horse for my puppet. a shadow’s first bone. the pill
in the egg in egg’s dream.
–
forgetful
lightning.
the deer dad resurrects.
not human enough for the census
poems, Erik Fuhrer
images, Kimberly Androlowicz
Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2019
~
A controlled burning of disparate abandon, Erik Fuhrer’s not human enough for the census deadpans, verbatim, the deepened instant. While the wordplay here is surprising, scary, and clinical, it is never created simply in service of becoming, but is instead sung back to both mouth and bullet hole as an unadorned canticle of detached vesselhood. The spacing of the poems coupled with the permissively decaying imagery makes for an unfamiliarity that describes things that are not the things described and breeds recognition on a land owned by embodiment. This is giddily annihilative stuff. Here is the math I did, during: when three of anything exist, it’s always the first and last that worry over how the middle processes apocalypse. The math I didn’t: whether white noise or fog, your machine better be working…
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