A Poem by Dani Couture

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

What He Ate Did Not So Much Relieve His Hunger

“We’re working our eyes off.” — Holger Sierks

Ten years a plan, the arrival precise, but with a slower landing.
The gravity lesser than where we started, turpentine sucked out

of the paint can. A negotiation of first-hand for relay, trading
one rock for another, smaller. The French president

dons his stereoscopics and we all lean back
on the collective couch. Now that the comet has us,

the industry of our concern commences its endless,
terrible orbit. The plot points predetermined, a susurrus

sound in the front rows, a reportage of all who’ve seen this
before, or something like it, a flickering of cellular

lights flickering out. Failed harpoons that cause us pause
or bounce. An aside: nights when the outlet seems too far

from bed to ignite a lean, I imagine the end of the world.
That I have the only phone left to call the only other

for which I have the number but a dead battery. Or else
I’m just too tired. A switch of tools and theatre,

whichever depending on where the nostalgia hurts
less or is less current. Arguments we could have

lassoed this princely island like a country song
written by committee while the tinker-toy pilot fish

tilts away from the sun and winds down
into failure. The view, before it goes black until summer,

unveiled to us like the universe’s oldest Polaroid. Forgotten
and found between the walls of the living house. Not yours,

but rented. The heaviest pieces of furniture abandoned
to your care because you opened the door.

All of space appears bent with no place to stand. The keel
of a shifting gaze with a black hole staked in the middle.

The eye no longer fixed or even ours, but shared. Here,
on earth, a study of children who recognize percentages

of disappointment more easily than others. Embedded training.
They spy angry wedged into the crags of everything

like love notes. Streets, doors, trees. Turn their faces
toward the sky. This filthy snowball is pissed, cringing

and waiting for the perihelion spin to reveal itself
more fully. Or maybe it’s only a chip of ice spinning,

space-born berg that will one day melt itself out
of our stare, or the reverse. Until then, a dust Rorschach

where every answer is breasts or home. Between
the morning’s forecast and messages on how

to keep the rats out, the radio funnels the hum
of our most far-flung worry, calls it song.

Dani Couture is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, YAW (Mansfield Press, 2014), and the novel Algoma (Invisible Publishing, 2011). Sweet (Pedlar Press, 2010) was nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and won the ReLit Award for poetry.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at [email protected].