EGAN GARR / 5 POEMS

October 24, 2023 / Always Crashing

THE AGE OF PROGRESS

No fort but sand

Watch the sea come up in rage

Watch it swallow the mustard fields

Witness the murder of everything

You say, I understand

It is the age of progress which is: the age of bodies on streets at sea in too far offshore in camps in churches at the feet of walls in rubble in crosshairs in the deserts we make for them
You lived too long believing in the age of progress

Look how wrong you were

Look how the acoustics repeat like air

Look how murder repeats like air

YOU HAVE COME TO WATCH THE END OF THE WORLD

I light the match
and hold it too close
This is fire I say
this is burning pine
We color the adjectives
and talk about how to color
The lexis
you must take with you
to keep you alive
My love
I am so sorry
All of the trees
still need counting
That saying
about crows and accuracy
was never meant for here

I, THE LORD OF SEA AND SKY

In the dark below the airways,
I keep watch from the tidy green

The engineer will measure

from the blue room,
the dark blue towels

readings from the floodplain

I hope we are not cowards

The lanyard tangles around the side rail

In two days,
I will stow the oximeter with him to the grave

Flight above the greenway trees—oh
would you look at that

I, THE LORD OF SEA AND SKY

In the first hours of the first morning,
I keep watch from the window

How the boy is measured

from the green room
the green readings the peach blanket his

oxygen
in minutes read in oxygen read—

It is many miles to the sandhills
each small alarm each traceable now each

step to the bedside also steps to
the monitor

The cannula loosening from his nostrils
the garrison
I am not leaving

In three months,
these readings will be a secret I keep

Light of the entire horizon,
light of the sunlight,
light of the entire sun lifting the entire horizon

IT HAD BETTER BE GOOD

I can barely stand the sound
of the hawkers the air

in the canopy great blue
sun at the square

bell that announces the door
that creaks and the crack

of plastic on the phone (a bag?)
and cashier and the beep of your card

or the street that spreads
to embrace you

the clink of keys in your hand
your voice dis-

embodied across
ocean and satellites

but
we’re not supposed

to talk about satellites in poems
like we’re not supposed to talk

about souls
and if we do then

it had better be good.

The point is:
I miss you.

It has grown its own
body like bruises

that come one by one
from your grip

your mouth spread wide.
I was just there.

I pulled that door behind
me walked down those

stairs got in a cab
and flew thousands of miles away

but I was just there. I was just there.
I washed those glasses.

I put that knife away.
I fed those cats.

I soiled those sheets
with my cum.

I was in that bed.
That cock was mine. It was in you.

Now I am trying to keep
bruises.

Now I am cutting my fingernails
that were inside you,

watching them swim down the drain.
Should we talk about swimming in poems?

There’s a body of water.
The water is a symbol, pick the one

you want. Take the man
out of your bed.

Put me back in.
Don’t let me leave again.

Egan Garr is the founder of Versal, a small press in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Garr is the author of two chapbooks, Terrane (MIEL, 2015) and The Preservationist Documents (Pilot Books, 2012). Their writings on the literary economy have been anthologized in Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016) and Paper Dreams: Writers and Editors on the American Literary Magazine (Atticus Books, 2013). Poems can most recently be found in The Canary, Zone 3, and Barzakh. Garr’s website is www.egangarr.com.

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