THREE POEMS by Curtis Jensen

THE BURNING & SINKING OF DEEPWATER HORIZON

6 figures in a loose circle
going on about God knows
I am the 3rd I am the 4th
I dream the others I am all 6
with infinite more the surface
—a Euclidean disk drifts
towards the river’s mouth

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YAMPA RIVER

You are unknown
& unseen
Your gneiss riverbed is unseen
Your remote and fecund gardens of flax are unseen
Your bends & heckling towns are unseen
& unknown
As are your fish & their open spawning beds in your gravel
As are your stones which are unasailably yours
which are knowable in their form: trough

As is your unassuming juncture with the Green
which is also unseen fluid plateauhip that it is
Unseen in its quickness
Unseen in its hundreds of millions of component parts.

We know your joints by both water and silt
by the cool pleasureful nexuses of your many component parts
We pry at your components in hope of a glimpse of your fish
& of you
Perhaps your traces will on the growing lacustrine of the Sea of Cortez
wash up.

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MAY 26 2010: A LOCAL REFIGURING OF THE SUBLIME

Like a blowout-preventor belching so
Much oil & at its tubing string it traces
Dark parabolas we see brown we see green
We see mechanisms steady the device
Release it steady it then release it again
The plume takes up seadebris & pressure
Who knows what else an old woman on her back
In the pathway slaps one then the other of
Her hem-stitched pantsflanks she laughs
No she cackles & delicate dandruff flecks
Nearby her thick bag & other things
—If pumping mud down the valvebody fails
Then cut & patch siphon & cap or a second well
Bored further along we have other viable options.

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STATEMENT

I write poems as a means to explore & express the interrelational dynamics of experience situated in a material context. That context is limited & at present in a state of crisis. I would hope that my poems reflect a consciousness informed by this.

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Curtis Jensen is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing Program at Brooklyn College. His work is published in The Bridge and forthcoming in the Sugar House Review, Precipitate and The Equalizer. He curates the Prospect literary series, and he regularly contributes commentary Electric Literature. Previous to Brooklyn, he has lived and worked in Utah, Wyoming, and Ukraine. He maintains a blog at theendofwaste.blogspot.com