Issue 29: Dominic Hand
from Anarcadia
XV
Post-harvest, wild relatives of clonal citrus trees
with modified resistance to anthracnose and blight
fall short of core nutritive criteria. In a land whose stones are iron
and from whose hills you may mine copper, strips
of pyropia and scraps of carrageen | careen through the sorting depots
to be dried on conveyor belts, sweating oil
and tar. For how long can such quotas and cancelled cycles
afford us protection | from our spendthrift carbon days’
proportions blown out | to bear the undue season, threshing
hyperchromic blossoms from self-fertile cherry boughs?
XIX
Roaming through a critically endangered reserve, our data reserves
begin to run out | so each fast-fading violet or white hawthorn jolts
along the lens | like a chromatic aberration. Trammelled on all sides by an air-
conditioned equinox, soft spikes of simulated rain begin to gild
desiccated fields with a moiré effect | airbrushed to fruition. With nowhere left to turn
we turn left again | sooner in exile among the lowly tamarisks; lured
by misdirection to abandoned arboreta | by their golden chain laburnums’
neon chimes. Unparaphrasably—as sap beetles daub
their metallurgies | empurpling the rushlit magnolias—what remains of our pre-
human harmonies hums on; unheeded by others | sub rosa.
XXVIII
Off the reference grid, where wild objects scroll | back along paths
to a readymade world, biometric insects flicker through the night
like so many automated switches. Sequestered indoors, I watch their green
affects | burn up on re-entry through the escaped velocity
of larksong, keyed-off into lost combinations | of sound in rustic hardware.
Elsewhere, reliquaries to the future stack up; printed three-dimensionally
over nondescript ground, where a holographic cloud forest | supersedes itself
with a binaural dawn chorus, replayed. Far more deeply interfused by this
polychrome immersion | you swap transhumance for transhuman to enhance
unreal elementals changed for lifelike skeuomorphs.
LXI
Inerrant summits faltering: a flotilla of deterrents
not misfired, albeit deferred above our heads. Panning
out mid-flight into simulated mist, inviolate relief-
mapped landforms reappear | as ultrarealistic
to the augmented eye; controlling crowds as one | might
monitor a swarm. Regarding this, I cannot for the life of me
wash away [delachrymate] our mutually assured de-
reliction. on our heads so be it : the impact of survival’s
ad interim extremophile measures on mute, as radio- | resistant
bacteria crackle under pressurized hydrothermal vaults.
LXXVII
Rife with hybrid vigour, sleep silences the working hive
by laying bare to view | internal lines of production. But who
are we, technically, to contrive | such faveolate passagework;
abandoned mineshafts salvaged on an aquaponic loop?
Scaled-up intensely, the intensive silver perch | outgrow the confines
of their concrete rearing tanks, where each abalone shell—over-
powered in the undertow—pries open its promised borealis.
Say that panicked kernels defrost in the seed banks, that world-
webbed nexuses begin to overheat, how will our leafless networks
massed into ruin | make arable null xeriscapes to come?
[Dominic Hand (b.1995) is a poet based in the UK. His debut collection, Symbiont: 50 Sonnets (Veer Books, 2020), won a Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award in 2021. His second book of poetry, The Data Harvest, a long poem in 38 parts about information culture and the digital revolution, is forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books in July 2023. His poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Blackbox Manifold, Oxford Poetry, Reliquiae, The London Magazine, The Best New British and Irish Poets, and Tears in the Fence. He is currently completing a PhD in Anthropocene poetics at Merton College, University of Oxford.]
Copyright © 2022 by Dominic Hand, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
