Editor’s note: In this week’s Poetry Corner, we feature the work of Dion Farquhar, a poet and fiction writer with recent poems in “moria,” “The Dirty Napkin,” “of(f) course,” “BlazeVOX,” and “Hamilton Stone Review” and “Shifter.” Her chapbook, “Cleaving,” won first prize at Poets Corner Press in 2007, and her first poetry book, “Feet First,” will be published by Evening Street Press in July 2010.
Rozerem
Sleeping pill prescriptions grew 55 percent to 45.5 million from 2001 to 2005
-IMS Health Market Research
Torture survivors
tell of having their eyes
duct-taped open
by our armed forces.
On Madison Avenue
sales of polarized
sunglasses soar,
along with speed-up, stress.
To Ambien or
not to Ambien–
pharma-ripped or
straight and sleepless
I swear, we’re wrecks
either way–
I am not bien
What Not To Write About: 2
Being stoned, exhausted, or bankrupt
what a novice texter you are
menopause, night sweats, insomnia
declining sex drive
despair being bad poetics
wanting
but being unable
to buy a gram of coke
how humanities
and literacy
are on their way out,
one big engineering school
the always-on horizon
of capital.
How It Is: Five Senryu
Capitalism,
labor, surplus consumption
happy bedfellows
Theory’s specialty:
descriptions of things that are
not and never were
We’re invested in
the system that’s screwing us
and everyone else
red flags wave, morphing
East Villager’s thirty years
in trenches temping
vinceremos
thirty-years later downgrade
to si se puedo
WaMu
You’re on the longest line
you’ve ever seen at your ghost bank,
one of the many October buy-outs
though it still keeps its own name
aggressive banners proclaiming
“We’re the same bank—only better.”
and “We’re becoming Chase.”
When you get to a teller,
one of two on duty, you ask,
How come you’re down to two tellers?
We had some staff changes,
whispers the twenty-year-old pony tail.
You mean there were lay-offs…?
Her eyes meet yours, hands still
moving, fiddling with slips.
For a few seconds,
we’re co-conspirators,
freedom fighters.
Have a good day.
You too.
Avatar
…but what thrilled you was just the
thought of their humanity—like yours…
—Conrad, Heart of Darkness [1899]
A century after Conrad
everyone but neocon swine
agree about the easy part:
we’re the veriest savage of them all
Cameron’s half-right techno fairy tale
conjures pre-contact Pandora:
bioluminescent blue-skinned
environmentalist natives
yet-to-be-plundered pantheists
amidst pop-up rain-forest flowers,
plugging their fiber-optic
tails into stalks and stems
never forced to crawl for crumbs
this zenith of civilization
despite its animal allies
and a sacred tree of souls
still needs a white male messiah
turncoat going native though he be,
and the white female scientist
sexless and single
killed off by friendly fire
to help defend their land,
bring down the machine
