8 July 2025
11 July 2025
submitted to Night Picnic Press 11 July 2025
drill, baby, drill*
wake up call
start from scratch?
it did. all life. the
black broth of it. next
to note: which ate what.
which answer, fancy man?
enough enough we cry
wringing our tears and
oh how our sides ache
for this century,
for more
silentium
the wind in the video the
trees in the light they’re always
moving if you look close enough
to touch them from far away
to scent them in your mind to follow
the old tracks to yesterday’s fall of
tomorrow’s children their breath
measured in this bright machine
this lapsed time this opportunity
to record a crime not yet invented
because nature does not invent
only we invent when we leave her
to what are not her devices
and is not her intent
in the naughty corner
then i imagined an
anselm kiefer-sized canvas painted
with rust and excrement and binder twine with
wire sticking through it – what is there
not to haunt? i thought, what not to hear?
as from the painting a wind pressured out
horizontally toward the viewer, flattening
her eyelids, streaming her hair backwards
into the dark – so i snapped the effect
from behind and that
was the beginning of the first chapter, i
thought
and with a glint of complicity
i drilled the gallery floor
for oil i suppose or
whatever spouts next
* The phrase ‘drill, baby, drill’ was first used by Michael Steele, then the lieutenant governor of Maryland, at the 2008 Republican National Convention. Donald Trump used the phrase in his 2024 presidential campaign and reiterated it in his inaugural address as the 47th President of the United States in January 2025.