Allan Peterson is a poet and visual artist from Florida. We love his philosophically and psychologically dense dispatches from “a paradoxical world / where the expected is the once unexpected.” —Dan Chiasson
THE EXPECTED
Indifference does not happen to the garden
or obliqueness to locusts
everything tunes to the incidence of light
these words blooming
into a book with similar urgencies
Yesterday fog clouded over the ghosts
or they blinded
couldn’t find us without blood or modifiers
then night the manta
that hangs out its vast exaggeration of fear
Weather had again rubbed things smooth
smooth and raw
at the same time with the same velvet and saw blades
a paradoxical world
where the expected is the once unexpected
we’re used to
and dedicated to those acceptances with emphasis
like a string of verysWHAT WE LOSE AT NIGHT
Frostbite conscience passion for the absent
the halt world simplified to introduction
Each time we go there we go there
while losing our coordinates We find our way
as if we were the home-going pigeons
like the ones in the experiment
prevented in the loft from knowing
the smell of direction by great fans
but when turned loose still arrived
During flight feathers and bone don’t register
Water and blood reflect radar
so the flocks are statistasized as raindrops
In sight of the industries venting toxics
the organs speak to each other through annunciate blood
Into the windows go thousands
gone tomorrow
unlike the apparent tomorrow with its endless life