News from our Astronauts at last!

(after Meret Oppenheim)

how quickly we’ll be reclaimed

into the cosmos when we destroy

this place, then the next

ashes to ashes, & the dust:

unintended consequence

of the booming space economy

the stratosphere littered with metals

from orbital launches

what no one possesses, everyone

can claim

We have liftoff! shout the astronauts

Weather still holding real fine

their transmissions to earth littered

with sharp Qindar tones

& the horizon check passes;

it’s right on the money

but for the proletariat, waterphone or

glass harmonica to transport us

to another galaxy aurally

humans weren’t able to see

a black hole until 2020

wealth a gravitational field so strong

that nothing can escape it

not even another channel of light

you’re an integral part of the intergalactic

ecosystem, the astronauts remind us

despite glitches in communication

(clicks, humming, moaning, yodeling,

knocks) that sound like the vocalization

of seals or a sequence of puzzles that

look obvious but are impossible to solve

last year scientists discovered

a strange & persistent radio burst

from a far-off galaxy that sounded like

a heartbeat, as if someone remains

capable of love for us

Where There Is No Vision

about minimalist art Frank Stella

said what you see is what you see

& he could have been talking

about atrocities on the internet:

how to bear witness to ongoing

violence & displacement onscreen,

—repetitions: still, even now, again—

what is our threshold of patient

looking? From the same interview

in ARTnews, 1966: anything new,

Stella said, had already been done—

all that’s left is zombie formalism

& everything is zombies these days:

zombie fires, zombie foreclosures,

zombie-themed prom, zombie guns,

some cicadas temporarily overtaking

parts of the US this summer, turning

into sex-crazed zombies thanks to a

fungus that tears off their genitals

but drives them to keep mating

nonetheless & scientists on NPR

call them flying salt shakers of death—

we often act against our own best

interests. You can’t sit at home,

even if you’re sick as a dog, says

Trump on the Iowa caucuses—

he is on the radio too, his voice an

uninvited memory exhausting me,

a foregone conclusion, a broken

series of slurred notes. Machine

learning uses algorithms & models

trained on data sets to perform

complex tasks & make predictions

without human intervention, & ours

is an age of AI, which is a zombie

oracle for answers to our burning

questions & consumes as much energy

as a small country. These days so many

photos in my feeds are greyed out

with the note, “this photo may contain

graphic or violent content” over a

click-able “See why.” Like Lot’s wife,

we usually choose to look—not

look away—& she thereupon turned

into…you know the rest. Flying sex

& death, those cicadas, & next,

sulfurous fire rained down from

heaven annihilating all the inhabitants

& vegetation. When does an act

of attention become some kind of

intercession? It doesn’t matter

what art looks like but how it is

used, said Franz West, whose

knobby enormous sculptures

stand at attention in the courtyard

of Mass MoCA, four biomorphic

totems in bright pink, salmon,

flamingo, bubblegum—fleshy

objects of desire, dead ringers

for cocks or dildos, the absolute

wrong thing in this perpetual time

of global violence, war, famine,

though West claimed he rendered

anatomical profiles of a man’s throat

with forbidden fruit lodged in it,

our folly of desiring that which we

should not know. To breathe, swallow,

yell in protest—this passage from

intent to action, tunnel of love

or darkness.