An Excerpt of Orchid Tierney's 'a year of misreading the wildcats'
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
By Orchid Tierney
the petronaut placed her hand on
the no. 9 mine train at Lansford and waited
prayer | suit
In Carbon County, the petronauts caw
to clear trees for the PennEast pipeline,
they say they have concerns about
contaminated air and groundwater,
mud swamps and wild trout streams,
unspoiled brooks to dip their feet in,
they say they can safely transport gas,
as a mausoleum of faculty,
and bring 12,000 jobs to the county,
they say they will post no trespassing signs
and conduct town hall meetings, distribute angry flyers
build websites and call radio stations
to raise public awareness,
they say natural gas is green like clean coal
and their teams live there,
they say they are citizens too
like bald eagles and bobolinks, bobcats and harrier hawks,
herons and cormorants, whose wetlands and parks are now at risk,
they say they will seize private and preserved lands using eminent domain,
they say Molly Maguire will fill their chests with smoke and culm,
stir up wasp nests in hillocks of black snow, because
everybody’s goal is mine more coal,
they say this is proof of my words. That mark will never be wiped out
this is your hous, notice you have carried this
as far as you can by cheating from a stranger he nowes you,
so they prayed: o dear lord, please help us stop the pipeline, amen,
“Say, now you’re cooking with gas”
Pustule Catacomb Molehill
Jump’d over a coalfield,
& in her best phallus burnt a great holidaymaker
Poor Pustule’s weeping, she'll have no more milkman
Until her best phallus is mended with silt
carbon sink
21 November 2017
who are we in this moment?
monsters, lobsters, or human globsters
the answer is:
floatable
like jellyfish
Does the ocean hurt? Are you hurt? Do you feel pain?
The poetics I have imagined are not sustainable, not extreme enough to handle the carbon in the atmosphere or the plastic in the oceans. I turn to soup to pipe new imaginaries into another, create compostable poems from different assemblages as if to foster an aesthetics of recycling the waste I shamelessly generate. I remember one disaster, I forget another. I rely on dust to delay hemorrhaging. I tell poetronauts I admire: textual collage is another form of waste management. How to metabolise the partial, the fragment, the sheen of oil? How to mine the urf with birds spilling bottle caps? How to drill the Poetry Foundation? It’s a peak poetry world out there. Time to pipe the spills into new rifts and wanting. Time to plant something more monstrous to grow
Orchid Tierney is a poet and scholar from Aotearoa-New Zealand, now residing in Gambier, Ohio. Her chapbooks include Brachiation (Dunedin: Gumtree Press, 2012), The World in Small Parts (Chicago: Dancing Girl Press, 2012), Gallipoli Diaries (Gausspdf, 2017), and the full length sound translation of Margery Kemp, earsay (Trollthread, 2016). First collection, a year of misreading the wildcats, is out from The Operating System (2019). She received an MCW from the University of Auckland (2010), an MA from University of Otago (2013), and a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania (2019). She is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College.
