Two Poems by Jeremy Hoevenaar

by: Jeremy Hoevenaar

In Jeremy Hoevenaar’s poetry our real, visceral life always exceeds our ability to fully cognize it. Even our most personal experiences and perceptions happen in the flow of the world, others, and all the selves we are, moment to moment: “the contours marking today’s/ iteration of acquired self.”

Residual Realisms
after Agnes Varda

If we
opened people
up we’d find
landscapes
formally absorbed
through the skin
spent all
day in
the way from sand
to reenactment
More
segments are
realized the faster
you shake
your head

*

Wear your
whole nervous
system on
your floatation
device living
then living
again as use
imprinting color
mending water
with a net

*

Wouldn’t cross
the ocean in
which you’re
present more
than separated
that any one
thought never
completes
multiple Earths
waging
physiognomy
bending
edges of
air through a
sustained contradiction
in reaching

*

Maybe forgot
time and houses
arriving in thirds
with too much exterior
a list of effects
to be on or around
think it or put
the words together
that make the thought
i was in
before location
arrived to exceed it

*

Loss of memory
is a subtext
to the satellite
array of deadlines
faking
trail or climbing
light
feet first
and plural pushing
several points
of access
from chronology
to topic
Autobiography is
other people

*

Pick up
purchase
put down
folds I
had a life
again to noon
in again
and shed
the present by
shaping tangents
against locked
surfaces shot
full of keys

Things to do in Brooklyn when you Quit Smoking

Subway to Manhattan, Union
Square farmer’s market, rotate
through it, drink coffee
walking, eat gluten-free
muffins sitting under tall
trees in what seems
like a new kind
of access, statues, complaints,
susserations, enjoy the possibility
of rain, torqued clock
still there from more
years ago than fits
the contours marking today’s
iteration of acquired self,
rage fluoresces, cheap shot
thought of as reflection,
learned architecture less sovereign
than its predictable shifts
indicate, watch the ball
roll, don’t stop it,
watch kid chase it,
a king of greed
in how he runs,
to find irritability in
people, in self, so
irritating, a scream of
flame washes itself out
into a long plane
of something like privileged
life, longevity or maybe
slower time, thicker light,
gravity more like a
conversation, all sound arrows
from source, the world
keeps going around corners
that never stop, to
Trader Joe’s for several
hundred feet of waiting
while DeeDee finds walnuts,
dried cranberries, I snatch
goat cheese without leaving
the line, products with
an imminent confluence in
salad, no alcohol, less
coffee, a phase like
a blink, becoming handy
++++with gaps
Return to Dekalb Avenue,
surface dodging shit, trash
presaged on wind, grit
right there in eyes,
eyes right there in
face, storefront orbit, striations
in extremis, domed hollering,
caroming shards, alarum, barking,
I want to kick
that dog? out of
spite? I have spite?
it rises, expenses drift,
flip the screen, hit
the feet, then fumble
keys into new clarities –
of weird layered smells,
of emergent multiple weathers,
of being damp and
useless, of duration thwacking
its frames together – register
stasis in the light,
sweat onto morphemes, equanimous
before sway and clot
of weeds, burr tinged
with purple on window
screen, dried curves of
kraft macaroni on window
sill, scatter racket of
fondled cans, portals to
basement molder in bathroom
floor, imagine Larry Eigner,
specter of the telephone
air, a center, and
then a sense of
wires, of rain, limit,
calling motion down from
its transparent cliffs, stained
stack of books, clothespins,
torn envelopes, folded cardboard,
++++sickness, order
Turn on the television,
Netflix proffers conduits, pinging
luminous flats, settle, scroll,
decisions chime, Rod Serling’s
face smokes, nope, Goebbels
wags cyclic fingers, no,
death of Polaroid, Patton
ponderous before a fundament
of flag, no, in
for a sale, up
for a war, peace
of elastic caves then,
unexamined liberties, I want
to think about technique,
develop empathy for timing,
space, or mutate proprioception,
bones liquify slowly under
pressure, strange backyard noises,
neither Yeti nor Sasquatch,
night rises, passing yelling,
a self-concealed density,
how many hoaxes left
before my eyes go
clear and talking, it’s
personal when the buses
squeal, sirens endless, close
the window, open the
window, close the window,
open catalogued dollars on
phone, beware repetition, set
an alarm, set an
++alarm, set

Jeremy Hoevenaar thrives with his beautiful family in Brooklyn, New York. He’s the author of Our Insolvency (Resolving Host, 2016), Cold Mountain Mirror Displacement (American Books, 2013), and Adaptations of Pelt and Hoof (H_NGM_N, 2012). Recent work’s in 6×6 and forthcoming in Elderly.