Mark Kanak


Ensemble

From the waisted department we
heard word of 357 beats a minute
and thawed electricity
at the gate; of flickering oedipus
and ensilage cutters to free
our entangled performers;
of detonation limits and lights on
the audience [flown in from Poland]
in order to obtain an
orderly catharsis.
What we had instead, though,
was rhythmic shoulder shrugging,
visual ebonite [hard rubber, to you and me]
and a whole lot of shearing machines.


support bearing

in retrospect,
one of the four curators
a willing sitter of quiet here-you-gos
sees lining in the bushing collar,
dams his cellular core wall
at the ostbahnhof and
thanks god for the 10000 visitors.
such openness and tension
can only prove a plate of the crankcase
to setting ring types like
you and me.

just appeared—
the waiting time shortened,
and summer coming too—
prismatic breech
mechanisms,
modes of operating,
and controlled device hotspots
of propagation,
of resonance.


derating curves

beam swinging
the collar with an ‘o-fer’
grid applied

muff of focus
loss of impression, harde
ning zone
keyway die Keilnut!

tradis tinction gunshots,
throwing power,
gone



Juniper

Red cedar’s giving twigs
faint bands of stomata
awl-shaped and twice as long;

red cedar, whose terminal
shoots sometimes droop
but are always quite fine
near banging blinds
and always whorled
in threes.

Four at window and plate
nearby, the poplar genome just unraveled
as it was, a gegenwelt of
possibility and

function.


Weimar

butterfly lint doctor
booths and empty
finger paints

slugs and snails eine entschwefelung,
picked clean sogar

left on table
in cup

left behind
missed,
dea / rly

broken frequency,
elongation, too,
and cross-sectional area
where she
met he [stoßweise,
and he gefährdet!]
gradated
to distance
before her

-all poems previously published at Cricket Online Review