I get
antsy when the free time comes
I think
where should I go
I go to
Maine alone and think
I am
alone
by the
sea
don’t
bring the sea into it
the house
ummmmm the mind
alone on
the drive
I am in
the darkness
an owl is
sitting in the middle
of the
road staring at me
I really
freak out
a thing
with wings sitting down
the
steering wheel steers
I steer
using the wheel
its
purpose
all these
forces pushing me back
to
equilibrium
I have
this feeling
I’m not
supposed to have
I call my
doctor in September
but
they’re scheduling out through the winter
I email
my doctor
I reach
out to the medical field
I go
through this phase where I’m like
okay I’m
going to return every email right away
when
there’s something to do
I’m gonna
just do it
I look up
a problem on the internet
I calm
myself down with statistics
and then
get struck by lightning
suddenly
my phone
starts
defaulting to a screen to do with
barometric
pressure
suddenly
there is a storm
and I
think what is conjuring what
if you
want to be a poet
you have
to be a poet
a sort of
anxious half-assed toxic mindfulness
you have
to sit there and let ridiculous
language
confound you
and say
you are articulating
the whole
in ragged impossibility
for the
sake of the part
that
needs you
when I
was a kid
this one
part
of my
hair would always stick up
now
nothing grows there
no hair
finds purchase
what
about seeds
what
about that really
cool wool
cap
I had
when I was 18
and that
later I saw in a photograph of me
with a
friend sitting on my lap
such unconscious
closeness permitted
certain
times in your life
otherwise
what you can gather from experience
nails
drilled into fossils
scraping
across endless slate
how it
feels to be like
what
should I do now
and go
ahead with regret
when I
was 20 I drove to California
I had
never been west of Albany
it was
hard to say goodbye to my mom
who was
with me driving
when I
got to California I was already
nostalgic
about California
my mom
flew home
I still
can’t explain that feeling
my hair
was already thinning
somewhere
a pine tree was already waiting ominously for me
a smoking
planet somewhere
in
another solar system
with a
star at the center
spitting
out Hydrogen Helium Lithium
Beryllium
Boron Carbon
Nitrogen
Oxygen
Fluorine
Neon Sodium Magnesium
Aluminum
Silicon etc. everything so abundant
in the
crust of the Earth
I look at
my clock
it is
3:33 I look at my phone
why do we
call it a feed
why do
you show up in there
Seth Landman is
the author of the full-length poetry collections Confidence (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015) and Sign You Were Mistaken (Factory Hollow Press, 2013). His work can
be found in Boston Review, iO, Jellyfish,
Lit, and elsewhere. He received his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature
from the University of Denver (2013) and an MFA from the University of
Massachusetts (2008). He is an English teacher and boys’ basketball coach at
The Putney School in Vermont.
The Tuesday
poem is curated by rob mclennan
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