These two poems by Brian Clifton stage an idyllic lyricism using the refuse and detritus of the mall-heap world. The ATMs and multiplex fantasies that gild a dated vision of adulthood, and an enduring adolescence, become the fodder for a decidedly uncanny poetry, which conjures sublime feeling even as the walls are closing in. The elision of details from these vistas of overstimulation reworks contemporary scenes through transformative puns, making the surreal appear ordinary, producing maxims from general description, and conjuring the kind of distinctly open personhood we find in an older lyric tradition. As the poems look backward and forward in time, the wretched specificity of present and fictional worlds is abstracted, not in order to be redeemed, but to better imagine what has been lost, and what we might now have again. Poised and laconic, yet resonating with a profound and personal need, the optical analogy for these poems is the oasis or mirage, something that both wavers and resolves under observation. If the parts of these worlds are already overheated, Clifton uses the fire of poetry to heat them further, until some things melt away and others become incandescent. —The Editors and the Poetry Staff
Automated Teller Ravine
at the bank I deposit my hands and withdraw
some water I am narcissistic in that I like
to look at my face cupped in my hands
my face meets the face I met possession is nine
tenths of the law I make me rain on me
my face covered with my face at the bank 24/7
Predator, Too
When enveloped in heat,
any anomaly is attributed to heat.
The leaves roil as if under a convex lens.
Windows shatter. Man after man loses his head.
The body, suspended, sees everything
as negotiation. Once, I held a bullet
between my thumb and index.
It was almost weightless. I flicked it up.
I caught it and flicked it again.
I stared down the metro tracks
of a city I just arrived in. Its dark mouth
spread. It was summer, the hottest on record,
so I was sweating, tied up in red tape.
The bullet—what a metaphor—
both hammer and nail. The tip of a joint
at the end of an alley is a target, the pupil
of a machine so advanced it’s alien.
I cannot do that, I said. I didn’t know
what I was dealing with. Then it hit me,
and out came the sparks.