Rae Armantrout
Two Poems

The Elect

I want to explore
the post-hope zeitgeist.

I don’t like
the option
of zero wiggle room.

I might mean
“I’m next,”

or “in the vicinity
                                of,”

or “about to”

move my joystick sideways,

register
for the long

interglacial
moraine.



Action Poem

    1

On screen
men discover
that their mothers
are imposters,
that their world’s
unreal.

Substitution
is eerie.

(We discover this again.)


    2

America
has a lucid dream.

She’s falling
from level
to collapsing level
in someone else’s (whose?)
terrain, through
floorboards, off bridges,
firing desperately.

Someone says, “Dream
bigger,” handing us
an RPG.

     
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