________
Rat Lines
In a blue June of 42, having evinced an impressive unity
they salted the wombs they’d split open with their knives
(salted the fetuses inside)
then did stuff to some nurses before burning down the ward.
and yet, here we are:
blowing up oil fields to godsongs in the pulsing throat
while tears cling to the tangled lashes of bar-coded childbrides
& I was in no way surprised by the rape-allegations
we dragged out from under the fridge
with the empty rat
poison-box and the mother-
Mary magnet from Rome for
once that’d been done
that salting of the split
there was never any
going back.
__________________
Rat Lines: This Spring
seed pods in the pockets of my
eye bags while petals in the fingergrip of a
six-year-old girl
brush across my cheek hairs
but when the
rain hits the air conditioner it pings
me awake to the soothing
smear of my friend’s voice reading into a bad
mic in London, & a woman
from the audience asks
his permission to skip the street
protest, I’m asking
she pleads, to stay home, I’m asking
what my back is doing on its back again
legs slightly bent as quivers of
the pleasure-zone move up
through the column of nerves as a rule
as a rule, we’re meant to want
so we want
the rain to pool
in gutters as a foot
leaps over the dark
past there where your taut nape in the
pit-grove was bent
there’s just so much yesterday and so many
rapes we cannot get out from under them my other friend
just before she went on stage
with her band.
________
Rat Lines
With dry lips in the afterlife, they want your buttercup and your one-armed
foreplay. Soon you’ll too be dead but “fuck the future,” you say as you eat
a pickled Julienned
beet.
_______
Rat lines
they want your gossamer threads to torch your fallen
idiom sew some mouth shut they want
your gender your sub-
versions your religion your
opening salvo and tidal swell
ineffable duende of your mother’s odor
forever installed at the nostril rim
they want they want your face in their
heat-trapped data-storage-bank-manned
by drones so grow
a new nose a vulgarer tongue
_______
Rat lines
that ragesun floods the geo
metric metro-bus seat up-
hole-story
the lib
id-in-all eco
loggy truck wheels suss
down the
conduit
tube called hi
way. that
deranged ragsun slides a-
long-side fur-
nature row & they want
yr topical schema, yr spit-on me
economy our
desire’s a lion’s
mane & they’ll take it they’ll
take yr post-
ww2 uplift, yr hs-sp-int
at the inn. yr
furry crack, yr ach-
ing blood-sack.
but at least they allowed you to speak.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Julie Carr’s recent books are The Garden (Overflow, book one); Underscore; and Mud, Blood, & Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, & Spiritualism in the American West. Her co-translations of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess—The Factory and The Book of Skies were pub-lished by Commune Editions & Pamenar Press. Books two and three of Overflow will be published sequentially over the next few years. She lives in Denver where she co-runs Counterpath, teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder, & hosts the podcast “Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone.”