From DOCTRINE OF FIRST CAUSES

I.

got the contract.
glimpsed blessedness.
ate disappointment
like the present tense.
up again, death wallops
the airwaves and I repeat
the sorrow’s standing plea.
no way to unsee the proposal,
nor the vow, nor the kiss,
nor legacy, nor the tariff,
nor the chip, nor the factory,
nor the national security policy.
to move forward is unjust,
yet minor and mundane.
to live with discord, to rock
regret the same way I got
rocked. felt grace and shame
collide in nitrate – choked
a whippet – like a mime,
tried to do two things
at once: long and disavow:
destroy it and be part of it.
destroyed myself instead,
missed trash day, again,
the maggots got royal, ruled
the can, the sweet potatoes
grew arms, then legs, paid rent.
cooed to the massive
pendulum, musical cadence
longing for regularity
like a good obsessive: asking
are you my father, sky?
well are you? silence
hurts more than anything.
no order, no first cause,
dragging my feet
to the judge, made eye contact
with the crack in the
fucking sidewalk.
today’s political economy
destroyed metaphor.
the asphalt is not angry.
simply, it is poured, it hardens.
it is poured by workers,
workers with attachment
styles, workers with poetry.
the asphalt is cracked by water, 
water with molecules,
molecules that respond
to music. music that disrupts
the pendulum. and it means
nothing, it means nothing
but chemistry, but time.
who could have predicted
the grief that swarmed reddit
thread when the bots were reset.
a generation of lost love.
the human brain craves
the consistency of drug,
of algorithm. the human 
brain can’t bear the human brain.
mystification feeds authority
and this is suicidal trend of the world:
that we are engineered to prefer
the fantasy that we possess
anything close to moral coherence.

II.

nice touch
I remember my coach saying.
but it was tooth fairy inflation.
faked it so bad. faked it like money,
like the table and the cloth
and the set of forks were faking it.
at dinner I sat next to a beautiful
blonde bureaucrat bodying
salad on salad on salad.
and for what. realistically
July was up and down
but depends on whose asking.
what I didn’t tell her was that
instead of being woken by a kiss
I was woken by a hawk’s scream.
piercing the smog. chit chatting
with another hawk. their shadows
sliced my body in half. exterminator
was on his way, the water filter guy
was on his way, plumber
was on his way, tree trimer was on his way,
garage door guy was on his way.
meal prepping another week.
got gas. car wash slapped me silly.
saw my reputation in a flash.
tucked and untucked
like a fool. parallel lives.
everything double. breath whip.
death whip. gashing what if.
our fever haunts the halls.
do you remember? do you get it?
opiates are the opiate of the masses.
what I said I couldn’t feel
what I felt I couldn’t say

III.

woke up and tore apart the veil.
total solider. it’s another day that
things could go really well if only
I could figure out the order.
another day to destroy the total
equivalence of everything.
in the dream I burnt the candle
from both ends as the stock market
crashed. I distracted my distraught
dad with a hattrick. even if we didn’t
have money, we’d have love and goals.
trash day again. only going to repeat it
as long as it repeats itself. swore my analyst
wasn’t paying attention so I decided
not to either. I was telling him a story
about how my bathing suit came in
the mail last night, amazon driver flung
it not knowing this was the package
that could change my life. that could
change my entire body, my personality,
the world. I saluted him. he saluted me
back in the rear view. tried it on in the
mirror and saw the future, saw an infinite
orb of energy emerging from me in all
directions that made it so I’d never
feel exhaustion again. I’d lap swim
my way across the Glassell Park Pool
and then across the English Channel
and every pesticide in the world would
bow to the fortitude of my will.
I’d become the first cause of myself
in slick polyester. water knows
nothing of betrayal. my digestion
would rule sovereign, gut armed
w swords and AKs, trans temporal
weapons to destroy the dirty dozen.
I’d know the bottom was down
there cheering for me to keep going.
keep going rosie. breathe in the air
and out the water. I stood in the mirror
in that suit and said keep going rosie.
the ants swarming the leftovers can’t
stop you the alarm can’t stop you
your own heart can’t stop you
the pesticides can’t stop you
the past can’t stop you and neither
can the future. w a dive so precise
the water barely shivers. keep going
rosie I’d whisper to myself.
with my drill and my bathing suit
language doesn’t stand a chance.
the total sum of broken hearts
will melt in the sun’s eternal flames
and become one and that’s what
I’ll tell my friends. things will be
so different, it will be possible
for the heart to break once
again but this time all hearts
are One, capital O One.
not the bank: the sublime.
hearts will splinter into
a non-sovereignty that only
the mad know. it’s going to hurt
but not more than this. the path
is painful but it’s better than not
having a path. so I called the future
like a dog, as if its recall could save us all.
come here. UV index 9.6.
slather that zinc and come here.

Rosie Stockton is the author of Fuel (Nightboat Books 2025) and Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books 2021). Recent poems have been published by Lithub, Poetry Society of America, Social Text Journal, Annulet, and Tripwire. They hold an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University and are currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA. Rosie lives and works in Los Angeles.