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from RARE EARTH ELEMENTS
Scandium
There is the flat cork.
There is the flat cork and there
are the hot flakes.
The nozzle glitters. The greasy
stardust. The cottony soil
and the venomous fin. Only the lankest
of tubes will harden this serum.
Pure wing wrenches up the fascia
and when the ivory horn
does not decay but dips
its weight in an immense
fringe of red abundance
sunlight will be crushed
in the gut of the little worm.
The diagonal calculates
the garnet eyes of crows
and predicts the pink effluent
but not if you have to ask.
Erbium
carrier
of teeth
the shallow
collapse into
tissue
a timeline of
fuel etched
in suitably pink
resin of mistaken
names
shortness of
breath
humiliating
perforations of
steam
cartwheeling
precision
at cost
Cerium
It’s what
we do. Salads
of rectilinear torches
mousing up the belly
alone with Carl
all day and about
as plush as it gets.
Clearer afterwards, the lump
in the leaning snake
belches along
emitting exceptional humans
while we barter
bombardment for wider use
in a duller lattice milked
for the last of its heat.
You can crack the moons
right open, tilt out the yolks
and without fee, carry off hefty
armfuls of grain.
Daniel C. Remein is the author of the full-length book of poems A Treatise on the Marvelous for Prestigious Museums (punctum Books, 2018) and the pamphlets Picket Songs (Dispatches, 2017) and Pearl (Organism for Poetic Research, 2012). Individual poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Holly White, the Internal Leg and Cutlery Preview (Critical Documents), No Infinite, Feelings, Lit, and elsewhere. He is also the author of the monograph The Heat of Beowulf (Manchester University Press, 2022), editor of a recent dossier of essays in Paideuma on Jack Spicer’s The Holy Grail, and co-editor of the collection Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy (MUP, 2020). A co-founder of the Organism for Poetic Research at NYU and former editor of Pelt, Eth Press, and Whiskey & Fox, he is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, teaching comparative poetics and moving between the medieval and the Twentieth Century.
Copyright © 2023 by Daniel Remein, 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
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