Chemtrail
The government’s been thinking
about us again plum tree dripping blood and stones
what do you think
thoughts running in long lines
intersected by other lines
and so in any given zone
note the sky with the sky in its mouth—
blue pig, blue apple
thinking that you step
on a carpenter’s nail dizzyingly
achieve the Jesus affect
[I’ll have you now x I’ll have you know]
[North by Northwest x South by Southwest]
[to dust x to dust ]
locally to add is to take away
and finding Xanax in the water was then as unsurprising
as everything on Xanax, remote
as other people’s problems
the largest mattress commercially available
being the Vitruvian
squares falling over squares
reticle unto reticle
exhale—the Rabbit escapes
this instrument for registering
[pleasure, it has been said]
fine changes in the wind as fire
density of affective particles I’m being hunted by a liquid
NOAH WARREN is the author of The Complete Stories (Copper Canyon, 2021) and The Destroyer in the Glass (Yale, 2016). His poems appear in The Paris Review, POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere, and his honors include the Yale Series of Younger Poets and a Wallace Stegner fellowship. He is a PhD candidate in English at UC Berkeley, where he coordinates the Lunch Poems reading series.