Interior Plus Itinerary Equals What

Ceiling-thief, but do you deserve so Homeric an epithet
I do give them out like free stuff, don’t I

The asteroids count when they don’t miss—sometimes
that’s a modern figure of speech

Sometimes you’re a modern catastrophe
What if asteroids didn’t come from space

to crochet cenotes across the Yucatán
What if nothing like that could have a comprehensible origin

What if they came from some hostility not represented in our
current canon of hostilities

Human beings don’t have climate

To say that would be really dumb
But they are very clear and cold and frightening

Here in the Chapel of Her Divine Counterfeit Brain Tissue,
ancient debris found far from where it belongs

rewrites the book on distance but not ambition,
not the ambition we know and love

that brought DNA into the caves
that invented the torch

Later the electron microscope and felicity somewhere in there

My over-searched concerns yield the usual

Potshards, phalanges, previously described extinct animal,
previously described irresistible superstition,

your heroic ghost

even though you are

not dead
 
 

Loud Spring

I undo the ambiguous abuses

I fix every obelisk

History is full of glitches that cause the present to crash often

If nothing could work as miracles are worked

the faintest hint of my lasting influence might occur in nature eventually

I post the epic algal bloom photoset

Plato alludes to a lost city called Chernobyl

Lame dystopias drive me crazy

Alternate timelines demystify this one

The Gulf Stream carries a consensus

over all the cool little seas of Earth

and deposits it right here at my feet

and I have no idea that it has nothing to do with me

but that is not my sincerest dilemma

Where the alternate timelines are

is a strange place

I know because I am there constantly
 
 
 
Peter Milne Greiner is the author of Lost City Hydrothermal Field (The Operating System 2017). His poetry and science fiction have appeared in Fence, Motherboard, Dark Mountain, Berfrois, Tagvverk, Big Echo: Critical SF, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn and works at a hotel.