The pallid hands extend on broken wrists.
A mother cries. A soldier holds his hand
up to the cameras and journalists

are pushed aside. White-knuckled fists
hold bandages and handkerchiefs and sand.
The pallid hands extend on broken wrists

from underground. A bitter rain persists
and feeds the muddy rivulets that panned
up to the cameras and journalists

on Monday afternoon. Official lists
are published and reported secondhand.
The pallid hands extend on broken wrists

behind a barricade as scientists
record the aftershocks and leave what’s scanned
up to the cameras and journalists.

There are no westerners. No communists.
A man in raingear hollers a command.
The pallid hands extend on broken wrists
up to the cameras and journalists.

Last year’s habanera stalks lay sapped
like the wooden bones of prehistoric birds,
full skeletons collapsed and broken, wrapped
in winter grass and ivy, spelling words
in a language that I’ve lost or keep forgetting
year-to-year as every year I stare
into the ruins of the fall, the netting
of a shipwreck, feathers, bone and hair.
The months ahead will shift through garden rakes
and Sunday afternoons spent with my daughter
tending peppers, yellow garter snakes
in dusty sunlight, chlorophyll and water.
This afternoon I start to clear the ground,
distracted in this brittle lost and found.

By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence
will predominate.–Ray Kurzweil

Are science and religion converging? No.–Richard Dawkins

Un-ring the bell? Impossible. It’s come,
Dispersed itself in every bronchiole
And office tower. Now the isotope
Of unknown metal bangs in every hole,
The slam of withered hand against a drum
Advancing like some crimson-slippered pope.

A lock of numbers. Law of propagation.
Our biology becomes a field
Of leapfrog, silicon evolving from
Petroleum. The softer senses yield
To matrices of predetermination,
Measured by a hand across a drum.

A rapture of electron retinas,
Robotic dreams, and sacramental math
Reforms the logos to a barcarole
That chokes the solace of our doubt. The path
Ahead is cleared and charted by antennas.
Silos rise. A fire in every hole.

My villanelle “Under Glass” is in the current issue of Measure, which is now a biannual journal of formal verse. I’m flattered, because most villanelles suck and these guys know it.

It’s everything that made you stay away.
The band-sawed bodies, flesh become concrete
and peeled artistically from bones that play
at basketball or dance. A human meat
extravaganza: Sideshow! Science! Sales
receipts! The likelihood you’ll never eat
another ham. But apprehension pales
before experience, which I have gained
begrudgingly. I’ll spare you those details…
and tell you how they carved the heart and stained
the arteries. And thus you will experience
a human travesty, your views obtained
without a tad of morbid dalliance.
By this, my harrowing might come to good,
and yours not compromise your abstinence.

A moral question rises, and it should!
The casting call: A score of Chinese damned,
dissected, torn or simply milled like wood.
It seems the Chinese century has slammed
into the Seaport like a ton of bricks
as disregard for human rights is rammed
into Manhattan like the threadbare dicks
of these cadavers dangling in the light
of high-rent public space. The New York Knicks
should get this kind of play! It isn’t right.
Apparently it’s legal…in Madrid
as well as in Vienna. Gesundheit!
Just thinking that the pitcher may have “did”
somebody with the fingers squeezed upon
a pristine ball is messin’ with the kid!

We voice a strong objection and move on—
beginning with the basic skeleton
bedecked in musculature. Gone
the pliant skin and “exogelatin”
of anything remotely humankind.
The fat is out, the acetone is in,
which leaves us with a polyester rind
that resonates with monster matinees
and robot porn. Move forward and we find
the veins and arteries in lighted trays
of…could that be formaldehyde? Perhaps.
We seem to be beyond all EPAs.
It’s red and blue. Astonishing. These chaps
have laced a bloody galaxy of gore
together—valves and pipes and bubble traps.

And next the nervous system. Which is more
or less a snoozer in comparison
to all those brilliant tubes they had next door.
It’s gray, like the intestine… and so on.
Attention spans are merciful sometimes.
It all blends into one big Fulan Gong
of dancers having done their time for crimes
unknown, extracted from some hidden jail,
then plasticized and peeled like plastic limes.
The specimens, it must be said, are male
except for one—and there it is, all right.
an overlit, explicit piece of tail.
A temporary sign hangs to the right
suggesting that they may have gone too far
with fetuses ahead. An amber light.

And as we pull our heads out of the jar,
a bone of metaphysics come to mind.
We trundle to the subway or the car
to Jersey or Long Island in a kind
of disassociation, having seen
the mechanisms of our lives. Remind
me, though, exactly how this magazine
of shattered parts we viewed comes back together,
how the system acts when lights turn green
and how our bodies are a kind of weather
vane and metaphor for light, betrothed
and married to a single spirit. There
is little at the Seaport treasure trove
that speaks to me of bodies! That cement
is nothing like the flesh in which I’m clothed.

© Rick Mullin

It settles in. And mornings are the worst,
as recent memories emerge from dreams
through which we grind our teeth. Recurrent themes
include the trial, the errant lover cursed
by issues of identity, the plane
that smashes into houses down the block.
We barter fifteen minutes from a clock
alarm that rips like lightning through the brain,
postponing our recession for a space
of time that passes in another flash.
Outside an engine idles. With a jerk
it lurches to a nearby can of trash
where story arcs of fading dreams retrace
familiar faces on the bus to work.

This is the sonnet sequence that closes my chapbook, Aquinas Flinched, newly published by Modern Metrics.

Video and Youtube technician: Roger Pitcher