two found poems 2015 | assembled from the pages of the new yorker

#1

Earthlings are fragile, demanding, and germy,
not obviously suited to life elsewhere.

Some people say it's meteorites that fell,
that crashed,
and that this catastrophe splashed up gold.
I don't subscribe to this theory,
but I am sharing it with you.
Now the rivers are polluted and dying,
the government forests cut down,
the groundwater failing.

The river never ended, and the children never grew up.
A time of broken windows.

I daydream about Nancy in my bedroom as I listen to my jazz records:
Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker, the MJQ,
various cool sounds to settle me down.

And yet there's something that I find myself craving these days;
that rude resistance to being sold to,
the insistence that there is, after all, such a thing as selling out.

Sometimes we're knowing about things that we don't know much about at all.


#2

Do not push it with the vegetables.
Those who order the pear-and-kale salad,
curiously wet,
will get what they deserve.
It is unusually barbarous,
and good at Twitter.


by Ron Reed