Andrew K. Peterson
Things
To Do Before 2028
sit up scroll up stank up heat up
smoke up walk
up slip up drink up
fuck up slow up
show up punch up
fog up one-up shut
up make up
wake up look up
get up stand up
Anodyne Centers
after Sophia Dahlin
Or, what I really
want to do:
spread health aalllll
the way out
around
sub-strain ricochet ricochets
not so full of
danger as to creep
illegibly
through Long Wharf
Marriott
Octopus Mural
Eh? pose, beautifully young
clutching a
tomato plant
in newest
author pic
on the lush
grounds some new place
to run uncaught
through
wolf-shaped
arms
as opal
liaisons barge across the moors
bucolic and
serial gains
tumble and the
cubs
gone out of
their think pads
near distant
wakefulness
fuck me in
amber
a Joey Ramone
cover
oof! a Nugent?!
Puff the magic
mayflower signature
intended as
reminder to twirl, twirl
bird-cunning bunting chords
carol
peripherally
a white iris
rosing
as white roses,
rising
up, out, &
over
over, over, & out
To the National Anthem
chrissi
comped us bleacher seats
for
singing you the night of a baltimore twin bill
but the
day game washed out
she
got bumped for a chorus of construction workers
who
built the new monster section
spent
the rainout getting shitfaced at the cask
(the rendition
resembled not scott key
but the
welding of the lugnuts
they
gave it their all as any kirkwood
buttressing
luxury at the aging lurch of chaseball
the
troops had just entered afghanistan
the
last row bros unfurled a great flag
to
show who they were for
smoke
behind get tossed out from
for
fighting some other last row bros
me?
i’m just keeping score
waiting
for a spaceman to play earth opera
for
his jaunt in from the pen
when
the game’s well out of hand
in the
end, what is there?
to
talk of passing time
the
weather is strange
no
summer this year
in the
days of the war
but
the red sox are winning
anyway,
we stood against you
out of habit and duress
in the humid blaze of
stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and
stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars
and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and
stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars
and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars and stars
forever
Work Song
after Gina Myers
“All
rest my powers defy” – John Donne
Summer
falls in false terminus: labor
abandons
austere measure. Watch a film about sharks
and
monoliths devouring an ocean tourist by tourist.
Work
Songs we cover every day until effort’s reassigned
or
the feather rudders yesterday’s Facetime in the park.
Cicada’s
hurdy-gurdy (my powers deify), but I didn’t see
a
dragonfly to lessen the decay or store my body’s rest
until
the sweat dries and the sea-carved salt from our backs
carries
back to the reef what Rihanna knows:
repeat
a word enough & its spiral collapses, incomprehensible,
a
harvest at noisy dusk offering its unspent labor to the sky.
The
height of my fight syndrome: broken drinking glasses,
dusted
magnets falling behind the fridge three tenements high.
To
do the work so I can rest the rest & make it (better?
make
good? or just: to make it). My worth is worth the effort:
work work work work work
work work work work work
mmh mmh mmh mmh mmh
wah wah wah wah wah
ahhh wah wah wah wah wah waaah
A
radiant hole, I fall
into,
until I labor, &
I,
in labor,
lie
Reparations
For a Riot Deferred
(Please,
please, please)
Lugging
Xmas bundles
consider
snow’s vibrations
the
bronze coated statue
slung
left, right leg strident
torqued
to cast aside, to walk on by …
what
I know about ex-Boston Mayor Kevin White: the strife of city busing exposed Boston’s
shining-city-on-the-hill. A white man spears a black man with a flag pole. Eagle-tipped. In the
ragged night after Dr. King’s murder, Mayor White negotiated with The Godfather of Soul to
broadcast a Garden concert. 60 grand agreed; 15 paid in advance, 45 still in balance to this day
he struts across the snows of Jupiter into whatever false future a Saturn blast beholds. History.
Going without haste from this imperceptible past. A stamp on
a ledger in Government Center.
The
night James Brown Saved Boston: the angry Garden crowd
ricocheted
forward, took it to the stage. He welcomed them on,
then
soothed them with a song:
That’s Life
It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World/I Lost
Someone/Bewildered
Get it Together
Please, Please, Please
Tear
it all down, & rebuild
with the hunk of The Godfather Face.
(Suggested
cost: $45,000.)
Snow
vibrates the sun on bronzed shoulders.
What
balances these relations
in
time? What reparations
for
a riot, deferred?
Andrew K. Peterson is the author of six poetry books, most recently the tete-beche double book Secret Equinox / Scorpio Journal (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). A 2017 chapbook The Big Game Is Every Night was mailed to the White House as collective protest alongside publications from Locofo Chaps series (Moria Books). A cofounding editor of the online lit journal summer stock, he lives in Boston.
