Selected Poems

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.