Ontologies
The love the love that massively seizes me,
the typewriter’s
ribbon needs replacing,
the great imperial
power game the price of oil,
a call, a response, I know you know
how precious to care is, the voice on the record on
the turntable is singing.
What is it?
What isn’t metaphor?
The rampaging of the Pontchartrain Hotel is
spectacle? The ammunition in the riot guns
is live.
The policeman’s control of terror
is apparent when his intent is
to put a bullet in your face,
and if you’re pregnant
then stun-gunned in the stomach
you just might miscarry.
In old Sainte Anne’s at a side altar are
letters written to acknowledge miracles.
Mind Drifts
I
On one of those late afternoon walks on one of those
late October afternoons, Water Street and Coenties Slip,
the Vietnam War Memorial, I copy what’s etched
in the green glass wall:
20 Apr 70
Dear Gail, you don’t know how close I have been
to getting killed or maimed, too many times I have seen
friends near me get shot, go home in a plastic bag,
it is time to forget, but it is hard to forget these things,
I close my eyes, I try to sleep, but all I can see is
Holder laying there with his brains hanging out,
his eyes shot out, hell, I don’t know why I’m writing
all this, but it feels better getting it out of my mind,
I love you, Pete
SP 1 4 Peter J. Koepke
A 3 / 506 Inf. 101st Airborne Div. Thua Thieu.
At the back corner table, La Colombe,
coffee black, no sugar,
thinking Hudson Street, cold November rain,
your right arm in my left, my right arm
holding the umbrella,
on our way back to our apartment after seeing
the first two parts of Fassbinder’s
Berlin Alexanderplatz at the old Film Forum.
Up Wall Street
the pockmarked limestone on J. P. Morgan’s bank,
the explosion in the summer of nineteen-twenty,
Morgan insisting it never be removed as a reminder,
a wagon packed with dynamite and iron slugs
made into a bomb, thirty-five killed,
hundreds injured, one slug driven through a window
of the Banker’s Club on the thirty-fourth floor
of the Equitable Building four blocks away on Broadway,
in retaliation for the murder of Andrea Salsedo,
a printer and anarchist detained for deportation,
his beaten body thrown from a window of the offices
of the Department of Justice in the Federal Building
on Park Row smashed on the pavement,
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti
arrested a few weeks later, electrocuted
seven years later in Boston’s Charlestown State Prison.
II
Early morning summer walk, the Hudson’s piers,
the thought, an act of love, balancing model
Cruise missiles on silver trays, pouring small bottles
of their blood on mounted warheads.
That morning’s billowing smoke of ash, debris
fifty stories high, people running right out of their shoes.
He purchases a half-billion dollar
four hundred seven-foot long superyacht
with its own support yacht complete with helipad
while those who work for him in their delivery vans
piss into bottles because they don’t have time
for a toilet break.
Stein,
in her Picasso, nothing changes from one generation
to the next except what is seen.
Across the street in Thomas Paine Park
the protestors yelling we will kill all of you.
What you describe for me, what you see,
eight stripes of dark rose magenta
cut through deep blue clouds, the layers
below it a pale blue,
ten bright gold scarlet stripes downward
to the horizon
meeting a green and yellow-tinged sky,
pure color
in the form of long, thin diaphanous clouds.
The Currency of an Industrial-Scale Slaughter
It exists, oh for certain it exists,
burnt children’s bodies carried in
screaming parents’ arms
exist,
shit, shit stinking drinking water,
because the hospital…
because schools
and hospitals have been destroyed,
the virus lab is caked in debris,
septic wounds,
untended, contain maggots,
and of course,
the army spokesman says, precautions are
being taken, but proportionality is
a subjective notion, isn’t it, a win-win,
the Secretary of State’s argument,
weapons stimulate economic growth, too,
in fact, the Pentagon is having
a difficult time finding cargo aircraft
to deliver them,
no food, no medicine shall be
allowed from our territory into theirs,
says the Prime Minister,
what we do is
precise and limited, according to
the Minister of Defense,
the President
is drawing a line,
the President is drawing
a red line, we don’t want to see
a major ground assault, the President says,
it’s time for this to end,
for the day after to begin, he says,
overseer of armaments procured for a state in which
a genocide is occurring, streamed live,
real-time genocidal terror,
artificial intelligence
machine nicknamed Lavender generating
tens of thousands of human targets, outputs
placed into an automated tracking system
Where’s Daddy? employed to kill each target
and his family in their homes—and yes,
the idea is to exterminate,
and yes, there is, isn’t there, an obligation
to pay the closest attention to the language we use,
the unspeakable exponentially unspeakable.
A Few Seconds Later
ontologies unspooling,
a sharp, cracking sound, the top half
of the South Tower imploded, the sirens’
collective shrills, finely textured
ground-glass grey-beige powder…
and I’m thinking you’re evacuated,
or are you in the apartment…
what’s that
the smell of?…
Department of Justice
torture memos are being signed,
on Fulton, undocumented
day-laborers are waiting to be chosen,
and them, they’re being moved out
at two in the morning
by order of the low-life raccoon-eyed caudillo,
transported by bus,
destination tent camps for migrant children detainees
in an archipelago of gulags.
Lawrence Joseph is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His new book of poems, Precisely Now, will be published by FSG in 2026. He is a retired professor of law at St. John’s University School of Law and lives in New York City.
