Jake Syersak

“how liminally can the lyric exist,” I asked the wilderness

& the wilderness just blinked. so I exited, stage-left, & offered

only my agreeing with green: explosions of caricature

I could claw from suburban lawns.

I’ve since trained my explosions to slow down, to reiterate

the pinch of the cricket-skull I mime. thinking as lime juice, browned into mud

thick as wet steak, produced

as we accumulate “the faculty to imagine that which

we know”—what a slinky & stairs

naturally do: slug on. on a scale of 1-10, indicate your exact level

of anxiety when asked to differentiate

from barbed wire & rose stems—if you’ve

ever felt it: a history of fingernails, grooved

into a mahogany witness seat’s

underside. our devastations grow with the slowing

of the nightmare Swamp Thing never was: distance

we’d accrued—as sieves—to dream

proximities between raindrops. this also manifests a suture.

just like you when you, for the first time, let go

your mother’s hand

in a supermarket, & knew—

& were sure you knew— the craze of opened spaces

Jake Syersak is a PhD student in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia and author of Impressions in the Language of a Lantern’s Wick (Ghost Proposal). His poems have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in TYPO, Omniverse, and Yalobusha Review. He edits Cloud Rodeoand Letter Machine Editions.