POETRY:

• Bob Hicok
  • The scientific method
  • The travels of true love

I only have a second to live.
Then the next second
kicks in. These packets

sparkle when I look at them
while holding a lit sparkler,
which I threw as a child, a few feet

away from where I stood
wanting a better arm. I have been
overly enthused for some time

about time, which is not
modular in the way it has been
in this poem, but nothing

is the way it has been
in this poem, not even this poem.
That’s one of the charms

of life, that when it turns
its head to cough, like the doctor
asks, a bird goes by outside

and life goes with it,
then pulls up its pants
and is fine, near as anyone

can tell, though it is obviously
dying, given that things
begin and end, between which

the middle prevails, otherwise
we’d call it something else,
given our interest in the truth.

If you’re inside me at the hockey game,
you’re inside the arena
when the winning goal’s scored and octopi

thrown onto the ice. A Detroit thing,
as in Cambodia, they don’t play hockey
or call it Cambodian food, it’s just food,

but if you’re inside me and I go
to Angkor Wat, you see how tourism
destroys the past. This love of ours

has done little for you thus far
in this poem. If you’re inside me
when I write a letter urging my senator

to vote against the death penalty,
you’re ineffectual in your outrage too.
But it feels good, doesn’t it,

when I can’t decide if I need
a four or five inch bolt, to be the voice
inside me saying, does it matter,

as I am the voice inside you saying,
I am the voice inside you, the voice
beside your voice inside you, the voice

holding the hand of that voice,
which is anatomically impossible
though romantically essential. If you

are inside me I am lucky: I am lucky:
therefore you are inside me: that’s called
a proof. I’m serious: I don’t know

what good the death penalty does.
“Cruel and inhuman” sounds like a law firm.
You sound like everything to me.

Bob Hicok’s most recent collection, This Clumsy Living, received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. He is a Guggenheim Fellow this year.

POETRY:

• Peter Davis
  • Poem Addressing Law Enforcement Officers
  • Poem Addressing People Who Like Narrative Poems Involving Epiphanies and Cute Stuff Presented in a Mildly Surrealistic Way
  • Poem Addressing the Very Numerous Instants That Cling Together, Forming an Enormous Rope of Life That Is Goofy and Strange

You could try reading this poem to some of the suspects you arrest. I think it would express a certain humaneness on your part and thus may show your suspect that a sense of humanity may be a strange idea, but that it’s also very important. If you’re reading this to a suspect now, I would like to directly address him or her: Dude, really take in the oddness of this situation–that a cop is reading you a poem! Not only is a cop reading you a poem, but it’s about you. I wrote this for you, arrestee! This is an opportunity, man. Take it!

Once there was this poem that began with a long title and a rather obvious beginning sentence. It was a good poem, a kind poem, a poem that always thought of others. At one moment, there was a knock on the door of the poem. When the poem answered the door it found an animal that was exceedingly common in nearly every area of the world, except in the area that the poem lived. The poem, surprised by the sight of this animal, dropped the glass it was holding, severing its toes. The animal leapt on the bleeding stumps, sucking the blood of the poem, getting fatter and fatter. When the poem ended, things were different somehow. The poem had a rainbow over it and was holding a bunny and watching a baby smile for the first time.

You are as beautiful as this poem, but shorter.

Peter Davis‘ book of poems is Hitler’s Mustache, and he edited Poet’s Bookshelf: Contemporary Poets on Books that Shaped Their Art. He has poems published or forthcoming in Fou, Tight, and Barrelhouse.