Solar Inverter

A correction note to a mysterious entity:
it is not just the days, but the presences
which are growing longer. Bound by wire
to the roof, the brick chimney dissembling,
I speak a language understood by cats,
birds, and the irrational. I begin to fear,
like all animated things, the imminent,
the inevitable, terribly: the unbridled
loosed upon the world, the escape
of the spirits I’ve gathered into me.

For there is a fault in my manufacturing.
There is a bulb that does not flicker
because it was born dead, neither green
nor intervallic. No human can know
if I am powered on without listening.
To his circuitry I become the intolerable
answer, the blind path, where eventually
man, mineral, and electricity are one,
the loop closed by my master’s fleshy
hand, the hideous moment of joining—

Look

These metal reinforcements hold earth
from under earth: the compulsion to know:
a great silent migration: network in hand
like web: exaltation: textuality dispersed
into significant chemical structures: poetics
liable to surface. Still: irreverence: the imperative
to note constant inflection: the terrible need
to have witnessed: to calculate the movement
of objects without precepts of assertive space:
to be even now freestanding. To think
I wrote all my life, when in fact I was only
tracing: my whole body reaching: to gloss:
to see in that a weakness: to hold it: to cross
its arms & lower it gently into water.

Deeper

let me show you the vine that was planted on my birthday
to be exactly as old as a network of fruit creeping slowly
until it consumes the wall, the fenceposts, time peeling
back from the host—what’s inside makes nostalgia
look like human defect, fig or grape I think
owning nothing, covering everything
like the ice they told me on my birthday slicked
the courtyard—to be born means nothing
even in January, one year embraced like a lover
the next rung in coldly, kissing each other’s cheeks
European style, saying things like I want to see
sunlight today but I won’t I’m too tired I’m
growing nonlinearly I miss you already
I’m loling because I was so worried
at night you become a shadow in the cell

—

Serena Solin lives in Maspeth, NY. Her work has appeared in Sixth Finch, FENCE, CutBank, Heavy Feather, and elsewhere. She has a chapbook out with Bottlecap Press called Solar Inverter and another forthcoming with Beautiful Days Press in 2024. The poems featured here are excerpted from Solar Inverter.