Lucifer as Adolescent
after Kazim Ali
He likes movies a lot:
the thought of an actor’s skin
turned to light. He
tells people he likes plot
which really means
he likes conflict. Watching
the dance that leads up
to denouement or tragedy. He likes
all the terminology, especially
shot and frame. A good shot
is full of emphasis, he says
when talking about his film:
it opens with a man
and woman silhouetted
in front of a window,
bigger than they are, exposing
the sky. The chiaroscuro
lighting pushing the figures
towards the audience. He doesn’t
want them to know what
the man says, but wants
to skip over it, to the woman’s
reaction shot: her lips parting
slowly, her jaw angling. She’s
about to shout at the man when
the shadow of a bird’s wing runs
across her face. He told me
about this scene on the subway,
coming home from class. She’s, only
for a moment, swallowed by darkness.
Poem Wishing that the Alt-Right Starts Believing in the Occult
My generation’s nationalists are really boring,
especially Richard Spencer who’s on TV
talking about the racial threat immigration poses,
which is really just a recycled line from less
than 100 years ago, which is probably why he started
doing the Nazi salute, except back then
nationalists also had vaguely scientific ideas
via eugenics, and many eugenicists believed
themselves to have occult-like superpowers.
Watching this makes me feel like I’m trapped
in a movie: outside the frame is the button
that will allow me to fast-forward past all this.
My favorite chapter of The Immortal Life
of Henrietta Lacks discusses Nobel Prize winner
Alexis Carrel who attempted to make blood cells
from a chicken heart reproduce forever
so that he could allow financially well-off Aryans
eternal life while all others went extinct,
(his ability was clairvoyance). If I could
fast-forward into the future, so that all this talk
is archived footage, I’d like to write
a book that some future person could read
and think more of these nationalists
than I do: they’d say This could make for good
conversation as they put the book down.
Nihilism Summer
The moon is a telescope for the sky.
Or is it that the crystal Dante saw
behind the planets was one cracked lens
unintelligible to anyone from the mortal
side of existence? Or is it just me? Blood
running down my jaw from the punch
I took in front of the speak easy
in the first circle of hell, because
I told the bartender that I was here
during the last harrowing, when Jesus
descended and picked up people
he liked like dolls, and no one here
will make the cut next time. The only thing
visible tonight is the moon
which you said looked like a ring
that a finger can’t fit through since
it’s already full of light
and love. It was a surprising
and pointless thought
that quickly faded into the echoing
sighs that fill the air.
Hypersphere
In Dante, the universe is constantly shifting
in relation to where one is, so that
when on earth, Satan is at the center, and
when one is among the stars, everything slides
as if on gears so that God is the center.
In non-Euclidian geometry, this shape is called a hypersphere.
The concept is not too different from when,
in the queer theory class, we talked about the intersection
of sexuality and race, and I playfully said And actually,
I’m just the least white person in the room. Something
I wouldn’t clarify when walking down the street
and people think I’m hispanic
and maybe a woman. The man outside
the gas station hollers sister at me, but
when he hears my voice he bums me for change.
I keep walking block-by-block, transmuting
as fast as the uncertain earth around me.
Anthony Sutton's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Cosmonaut's Avenue, Midwestern Gothic, Third Coast, and elsewhere.