Alan Isaacs lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and makes ends meet in the software industry. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University, focusing on contemporary American literature within the aura of postmodern theory. His writing both engages and resists that background, along with a childhood on an Idaho potato farm, sojourns in France and Mexico, and two years teaching high school via the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso, West Africa.---------
To Have to Hunt for Food
cometh dread night
hanging lamps they
walk us down to the river
slay and wash
our pale slain bodies
release the entrails
crack joints peel skin
it hurts the way they kill us
desultorily
-
just club them in the head
but I’m not very good
I’m just a child myself
sent to do a man’s job
and it takes repeated blows
I am past feeling, past feeding
and morning remember and begin to domesticate
instruct how after eating counting can disinfect
the human virus prefers less diversity
no one knows why I never loved my slim body
slim me limbed
No Twinge of Romance
I said I loved you because I was sorry
I said and said and seeped dark into day
eventually saturating
the way one perceives the momentum of history by sitting still
beneath notice, except
to idle observer or scientist
copulates to right-angle geometries such as grids
cleaves to high chromatic melodies
elegies’ bitter organic residue
yet fails feeling
you think too clearly, you in the driver’s seat
have a heart and braid your anguish into a passable show
accolade in the entryway
symbiotic registries
break like said
you would and spill
wine all over the carpet
redolent, fastidious
ill-equipped captivating incident
placid is not serene
lay it down again in the dry grass meadow
two red-tailed hawks glide above too over