Circumspect (Groceries for Paul Celan) by MLA Chernoff

October 26, 2022
Poem name: Circumspect (Groceries for Paul Celan) Poet name: MLA Chernoff Poem: Apart from all our loans— credit grown small, default seeping— our luck shifts gears into seeming, flounders by the flowers, banks a stray note slaw-to-finger, and sleds us through doors automatica. An arbiter’s whim sets the stone of this unfed journey and drags our pennies through aisles of condemned condoms, glacial wet diapers—that facial place where stomachs recoil at the sight of others, their nose-born freedom, tasking the right to piss a cure into a war of civil winds, flowing: pipelines of austere posterity, thus making it possible for us to do one thing today and the same thing tomorrow— to sequester in the morning, cry in the afternoon, and ideate in the evening. We cuss all kinds of allegiances at the numbering numbers checking themselves out in cornerbound mirror, taunting us back to a different kind of realism— a subtler zone of no return between the teethed and barbarous scansion of the code. Dumbass drum— triple bass of lockstepped day: We cannot forget the plight, it weighs our tonnes in the tripled swell of caskets from Toronto to Montreal. We cannot dance around it when the front doors seek to pound it. Our confidantes ail their own half-masts, lurking in the husk of Greek alphabets; the streets wall us in and tell us to concentrate, to employ another application, to cook a meal at half-mast so more days can dud our lies into living— tomorrow and forever, never let the produce tremor. Restart: there too you hide the greatness. There, in the midst of culpability, the ball where chains block to other verses. Go ahead, call the hypocrite, call out to its digital homeland: January. They shall not buy the pressure. Newly worn: you know how they see you from across our circumstellar car, drinking the water, shovelling old plinths, slushing trades from the inside out— come with us, we shall lead you astray to the choicest of books, their final pages to come, and again, come. Hum with us—our impoverishment at wit’s end, passing a sky’s worth of acrid meridians. End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © MLA Chernoff MLA Chernoff is a poet, performance artist, cringe enthusiast, recovering academic, and – if the Canada Council asks – a novelist, who definitely knows how to write a novel. Their debut poetry collection, [SQUELCH PROCEDURES], was released by Gordon Hill Press in the Fall of 2021. MLA is also the author of four chapbooks, including delet this (Bad Books, 2018), TERSE THIRSTY (Gap Riot Press, 2019), executive dysfunction (nOIR:Z, 2021), and SCRIED FUNDAMENTS (above/ground press, 2022). Their fifth chapbook, I’M LIKE THE GREAT-GRANDCHILD OF MARX AND COCA-COLA (BUT NON-BINEY), is forthcoming with 845 Press in the Fall of 2022.