By Remi Seamon
Meanwhile, Siberia
Long weeks
full of swallowing and goodbyes,
full of lining up
next to caskets to receive
strange kisses on the cheek
full of returning
to watch the camels in Siberia
on the television
who can smell water
30 miles away… and even after
switching it off, and taking our
selves to bed
the camels keep galloping
somewhere through the desert, looking
for water —if I’m being honest
they obsess me
more than pickles or men
and I think of them more than feminism
or February 24th
the day my grandfather died
and somewhere the camels
quietly carry on
pulling ice
from the frozen stems of yellow
Siberian grass
which melts in their hot, red mouths
and trickles down their wooly throats
and keeps them alive.
Arc
It’s not that hard to write a poem
when you’re full of wine and light-
footed animals, and it’s past three
and someone’s yelling on the phone but you’re
on your back staring at the ceiling
counting cracks… not everything’s
a movie. Sometimes men
have tattoos on the back of their neck
for no reason
and no one kills Jennifer Coolidge, she just dies
and you can’t always see the moon
not because the government makes you pay now
but because there are clouds
though maybe that too. You can’t
always change things
and Jesus can’t save the whales
but you can hear the cool water slapping
against the sides of the boat.
The TV
I watched you through the TV
turning stones over with your shoe. You
were someone I loved, badly cast
in a suit. You were forced to grow
a beard longer than the road
that leads to the place
you were never born… I pour tea for us
and drink it by myself. It’s the color
of policies and the taste of love
that someone left on the stove
until it spilt, and gave us
third degree burns. The TV
is a box that holds love
like wind. Your voices reaches me through it
your voice, searching for the end
of the poem — a child looking for a hand
or the poem looking back at itself —
there you are, being watched, peeling
an orange, there I am, drinking my tea
burning my love on my tongue
wanting everyone safe
and dead
and televised.
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