by Ben Lerner
The holocaust is advanced tentatively to test public reaction.
Weeping is substantially, but not technically,
an admission of wrongdoing.
Flight attendant: Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my—
Control tower: Take deep breaths.
A quick search has turned up the appropriate affect.
I respect the silky detail of your still-life paintings.
If you had been hypnotized, silly, you wouldn’t know it.
This way the reader can answer other incoming calls.
Proceeds from the arms sales were then funneled to the Contras.
They held my father down and shaved his beard.
America is the A-team among nations,
bursting with energy, courage, and determination.
May I put my tongue in your ear?
Never wake a sleepwalker.
The Orient has regained the lamp and we are doomed.
Such a process of repetition is called reduplication.
The passion to be reckoned upon is fear.
The audience hears the voice of an on-screen character
who is not seen speaking.
These angels will eat anything—demon, sparrow, angel.
My ability to appeal to white Southerners
has diminished considerably
since I posed nude in the pages of Foreign Policy.
My government dropped an aluminum soap of various fatty acids
on my pen pal and her family.
Why don’t we blame the sinking on Spain?
Financial benefits accorded to big business will be passed down to consumers.
Reading is cool.
A little shadow enhances the memory.
We conduct ourselves in a free and easy manner
but at heart are false and cold.
“God Bless America” was memorably sung by Kate Smith.
They were married hours before their double suicide.
You never called me before I was famous.
The names of the dead are inscribed in the wall.
The play is making Hamlet’s mother uncomfortable.
I can’t feel my legs.
The limit of latitude past which trees will not grow.
Tear down this wall.
Let them eat snow.
Then, without warning, our guiding star burned out.
We stood around the sleeping infant to see if she was breathing.
The poet notes that beautiful days and seasons do not last.
My emergence from my mother was captured on film.
All I ask is that we stop executing the mentally handicapped.
The stadium lights prevent the cereus from blooming.
But what if the mentally handicapped want to be executed?
Big Bird towers over the human actors.
We have both the right and duty to expand
into the blasted lands of southwest Asia.
Let’s add touches of ethnic instrumentation.
I am attracted to women I do not respect.
The child makes a substantial advancement in poetics
with a canister of hair spray and a Bic.
Then you wake up next to a war criminal.
A rapid slide through a series of consecutive tones.
The memorial will have to be continuous.
Lift every voice and sing.
Your brother told me he feels mostly dead on the inside.
The strings are damped by wood and metal.
Station signals, picked up by elevated antennas
are delivered by cable to the receivers of subscribers.
Sexual abstinence is a partial solution.
A vague but strong attraction draws me to Moscow.
The white prizefighter doesn’t have a prayer.
Entities should not be multiplied needlessly.
I can get you a healthy baby for five hundred dollars.
It’s a lot better if you take out the plot.
Silvered surfaces face the vacuum.
The nightingale filled the pauses between sobs.
Mechanically separated chicken parts.
Crocodiles weep to attract victims.
There are such moments in life, dear reader, such feelings…
One can but point to them—and pass them by.
All that remains of pleasure is frottage.
The clouds were sown with crystals of dry ice
to stimulate rain for the president’s funeral.
Private-sector affluence, public-sector squalor.
The hostage is growing romantically attached to her captor.
Jesus likes me.
My visit to the dermatologist possessed a nightmarish quality.
Mercy, the speaker is instructing Shylock, must be given freely.
Then this girl stood up.
She couldn’t have been more than sixteen.
What if we just stop killing people
no matter our reasons?
Mathematics and literature are antagonistic cultures.
The camera moves steadily on the dolly.
Tempered to break into rounded grains instead of jagged shards.
I orbited the earth forty-eight times aboard Vostok 6.
A term for dreamless sleep no longer in scientific use.
What about the love, she asked,
the love, the love
the love?
People were laughing and booing.
The studio manager was waving his arms.
The candidate said something about the road to hell.
Updates are ready to install.
Splash paint to achieve a spontaneous effect.
Children gain pleasure from both passing and withholding.
Oyez, oyez, oyez.
They slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God.
Is this thing on?
About the Author
Ben Lerner is from Topeka, Kansas. He holds degrees in political theory and creative writing from Brown University. His first book, The Lichtenberg Figures, won the 2003 Hayden Carruth Award and was named by Library Journal one of the twelve best books of poetry published in 2004. A former Fulbright Scholar to Spain, Lerner co-founded and co-edits No: a journal of the arts. His poems can be found in a variety of literary magazines, including Boston Review, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Fence, The Paris Review, Piedra de molina (Madrid), and Ploughshares. He lives in Berkeley.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Chain, Colorado Review, Common Knowledge, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Jacket, jubilat, LIT, Passages North, The Poker, Provincetown Arts, and Revista de literatura hispánica, where some of these poems first appeared.
Thank you, Ariana.
Copyright 2006 by Ben Lerner
All rights reserved
Cover art: The protective cover of NASA’s Voyager Golden Record. A 12-inch phonograph record, the gold-plated copper disc contains sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.
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