Issue 30: Daniel Remein

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. 


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