THE FIRST TIME YOU TRIPPED ON ACID YOU TRIED TO WATCH TV AND THE SCREEN BEGAN WARBLING SO FAST IT TERRIFIED YOU

Dressed shoulders of the fetish city
I climb inside and confront the secret

People sleeping under the platform levels
Intelligent supermarkets downloadable content

People sleeping over people
Flesh cuts brightly to the moon of riot

We are pleased that your car is on fire
To cascade through the underpass canopy

Freedom chariot draped in blood trellis and plant matter
See the site of crash landing:

The vehicle which never swerved
The bridge never fell
There was no drought

There was no military helicopter in civilian airspace
Just thousands of gallons diverted into bewildered ocean

A person freed by other people
From submerged torture of future decades

The potential of a hand filling out a state document
To release each minute to the collective hour

A new astrology
Composed of vibrating forests
Once commodified for the house plant industry

Our gifts break apart in this manufactured scarcity
Our lips don’t touch but could

LONG PLAIN ROAD

Word of mouth unlocks decent swimming
holes. The drive to the river takes you past the jail.
You told me about a childhood in Illinois
and the drive-in. The delicacy of the story divides
this world into who we are when we are not in love
and who we are with a sense of flight and shape.
Disentangling causes us a lot of shame.
When we are not eating or dreaming, give us
bits of text, words that pour from official mouths
a lapse in the play like, how are you? Good, how are you?
It takes a lot of coordinated thought
to detract from those overdetermined structures.
We stay and read art, porn music play show
Towns with no sidewalks, siege warfare.

WALKING THE CAT

It feels good to know my labor is real
As I lust after market commodities
Oil sculptures impoverished as the 8 hour day

I have become the master of knowing
I know a 737 Boeing is worth nothing
I know money never happened
A bear in the woods is innocent of illegal activity 

These repressive structures never transformed
The week ends in play
We look the same under the covers
A fence torn down
The radio seized
The world addressed

Since I returned home I’ve been dysregulated
Is it ok to put nonsense to rest
And give its eulogy in a garden?
Here lies Phoebe’s need for affirmation
The garden of vulnerability 
Supplied vitamins to many worms 
To engage spinach becomes a calculus 
A worm braves the trip through the topsoil 
Finality is a paper tiger

My loves, remember me when 
My dead labor is calcified in glass
I’m a ripple in a window pane
Enveloped in October frost

My misshapen longing
In this rodeo of time
Many modern-day entertainments will collapse 
The moment animals become free

Phoebe Glick is a writer and teacher. She is the author of the chapbook The Afters (Spiral Editions) and has work online at Social Text Journal, Cleveland Review of Books, Black Sun Lit and elsewhere. She is a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts where she studies Marxist and anticolonial thought, poetics, and riot.