From TEMPORARY MEASURES
Which moves more effortlessly, air or mist
smoke needs someone to create it
I was mostly in the flow, socially speaking
when I started smoking, perhaps to
stay near the people who smoked. Mist is
more circumstantial, rolling off the bog
at sunrise. When my mother died she went
quickly. My father took months, lurking around
haunting the house, delusionally entertained.
My mother used to say, on cloudy days,
“the sun is trying to come out” as if weather
efforts. What should I do at the gathering?
Lurk with the circle who make me nervous or
stand with the smokers who laugh? Fine lines
around the mouth like lichen on fallen tree bark.
Shadows stretching dense with late afternoon light
or morning fog over the hills. Fog can have a kind
of clarity, standing alone breathing it all in
or watching it roll away from the sun. It has to.
+
I hear the woodpecker
communicating precisely
at 15 mph with a force
30 times its body weight
it’s warm but not too warm
a breeze paints the sun
across the grass, blowing
the dust of winter off
in full body coordination
with the echoing clicks radiating
across the pecking distance.
Sing to us a hammering song!
The whole yard releases a charge
in waves of salvia and sage.
Looks like I waited
to love everybody til
things were nearing the end.
We negotiated our territorial signals
a temporary truce, a cushion
of air around the mind
to protect our woodpecker brain
we can all work together
we don’t have to attack the starlings
we can create an order of our own
holes to be still in
that’s summer coming
just when we thought it wouldn’t
we found our way to an end
in each other, that’s garden
ing for you, a cloud passes
temporary, shadowing the lawn
+
Essence is slippery
it can’t touch itself
everything transparent
hides, in gusts of midnight.
Essentially we don’t
know what we are
but every day we
wake up thinking
we know where,
that there is a
blue space above us,
where the sun rises and
the moon wanes.
Substance holds us
at arms length
a morning mist, we,
naming things instead of
harmonizing with them
3 am street lamps
high from two
sleeping pills, resisting
hard forceful daylight
the coming heat curls leaves
reflects through the trees
back from behind where the
sun hid from winter
+
practicing my dialectics
when on the one hand
I gotta have a job
but on the other hand
I don't really gotta do it
on the one hand I show up
but on the other hand
I’m never fully there
writing poetry at my desk
give customers refunds,
students A’s, cuz on the one
hand, mission critical outage
but on the other, buy muffins,
call out for no reason
except it’s too nice to go to work
which is a great reason
on the one hand, malicious
compliance, dog and pony
in the actual office
and on the other hand
just come in two hours late
take two hour lunches
leave two hours early
absolutely just tempt them
to fire me, and if they do
collect unemployment
which on the one hand is hard
beans and rice, bread, water
but on the other hand
write more
till the money runs out
and I just get another
bullshit job I don’t really do
Kristen Gallagher has a recent chapbook out from spiral editions called New American Summer. She has published four books: 85% True / minor ecologies (2017), Grand Central (2016), Florida(2014), and We Are Here (2011). Her ten film collaboration with Tara Merenda Nelson received a NYSCA Artists Grant in 2022. You can find some of her work online at Air/Light, The Baffler, Peach Mag, Tagvverk, Social Text, or The Brooklyn Rail.