Second Spring 

Term poems are numbered lists. The number is 10, because it’s the perfect number, something I’ve believed since childhood when everything was grouped into 10s. To make them, I search for a single term within the 500 page Word document where I save the text from my monthly email newsletter, The Courtney Report, a strange, long correspondence I have been writing and sending out since October 2020. I copy and paste ten instances of the term into my numbered list. I assign the fragments to numbers intuitively, not chronologically. My hope is that these fragments interact and do not interact in interesting ways.

OPEN

1. Rilke says animals can see into the Open. That people who die become it. 

2. My landlord wants to try to trim the tree from inside my bedroom by hanging his body out the open window with a set of shears even though I told him I tried to do the same thing and cut branches with kitchen scissors and found it to be very dangerous and a bee tried to fly into my apartment and so did a green bug and I only had the window open for about five minutes.

3. FILM JOINED TO LAY OPEN THE LOGIC OF A PERSON’S THOUGHT, Tarkovsky said that, about something.

4. I saw Peter and Julia’s show Open Mic Night, which was truly beautiful. In the show, Julia said the first thing Peter ever said to her was, “I can’t wait to make you laugh but I can’t do it right now.”

5. My mom called the Mardi Gras store that is only open six months out of the year a multi-million dollar juggernaut.

6. One of the little girls opens the bags of mango for the other little girls because she’s good at opening the tricky bags.

7. A24 needs to take a note from Saving Silverman for once and open a movie with Steve Zahn talking directly to camera, narrating footage of his mother going into labor.

8. Does anyone know why I bought this hard-boiled egg and gouda box from Starbucks and then why I opened it on an airplane?

9. Peter Falk in Opening Nite. Someone who died and became it.

10. Anyway, the landlord did come and trim the trees by hanging out my fifth-floor window that can only open one foot and I’m pretty sure he stole a book while he was here. (My Struggle by Karl Ove Knaussgard)



GLASS

1. I read somewhere about a hermit who was watching his hourglass without praying, who heard noises that split his eardrums. He’d suddenly heard the catastrophe of time.

2.  I walked all around and bought a little glass chicken which I gave to Julian for his birthday, a bubble tea, and a plain roll from a bakery. I went to rest my body in a chair on the quad at the Brown campus and as soon as my butt hit the chair and I took my first bite of plain dry bread, a woman appeared out of nowhere and asked if she could do a prayer for me.

3. In Prospect Park one of the bicyclists called me “a dumb piece of shit.” He specifically said, “You are in the bike lane you dumb piece of shit.” Clear and loud. And I realized I had never really been called anything that mean before even by, for example, my ex who flipped a glass coffee table in our living room and made me believe I was a sociopath.

4. I don’t know. I received vodka with orange juice. When have I had this drink before? I look into the glass, as if it contained a second one, and then I remember, I feel very hot and I’d like to drop the glass or empty it, because I once drank vodka with orange juice high up in a house, during my worst night, someone wanted to throw me out the window. Ingeborg Bachmann wrote that.

5. There is nothing more grating on the nervous system than the sight of Chihuly glass.

6. I order a glass of their red wine, the one that is sitting on the shelf open for who knows how long, and ask for it with ice. The wine comes back tasting like cold grape jelly.

7. Her photos are so actively devoid of life, feature only the lifeless residue of life, that one day, when she took a photo of a living spider under a glass, it felt provocative.

8. I’m thinking of a very serious, shy girl with blonde hair and glasses who was in the film department. She was really tiny and pretty and she never talked but had an incredible amount of caché because she had gone on a couple of dates with James Franco who was an NYU student at that time.

9. “We’ll slaughter the lot of them!” Nikita agreed, and poured some tea from his glass into his saucer. “Wounding women to death is impermissible.”  Sonia sat there in fear.

Andrei Platonov wrote that.

10. You’ll never see the sun again. Rats will bite your earlobes. The movie Heart of Glass is a poem. The town revolves around the ruby glass. The only man who knows how to make it has died in the night.



EARTH

1.  Before leaving my apartment, Nora said she was a real deal lover here on planet Earth.

2.  My boss who I found out a few months after working for him was a Chilean mine financier (scum of the Earth, but my money also comes from the Chilean mine, doesn’t it?) (and his company dissolved so now he’s unemployed) gave me a little bite of alp blossom cheese from the end of a knife after he did the same for his two kids. We never talk, and this was extremely intimate.

3. Moments after she said she was a real deal lover here on planet Earth, she said that poetry was hardcore porn of vibes. 

4. I read a book about aliens who came to Earth in North Carolina only for it to be discovered by a man named Chris Bledsoe that they are Biblically accurate angels.

5. Comrades, let us at last drink so we can gather our strength for the defense of every infant on earth and in memory of the beautiful young woman Rosa Luxembourg.

Platonov, in Russian originally.

6. Ghosts are, as it were, shreds and fragments of other worlds, the beginning of them. A man in health has, of course, no reason to see them, because he is above all a man of this earth and is bound for the sake of completeness and order to live only in this life. But as soon as one is ill, as soon as the normal earthly order of the organism is broken, one begins to realise the possibility of another world; and the more seriously ill one is the closer becomes one’s contact with that other world, so that as soon as the man dies he steps straight into that world.

Dosteovsky wrote that, in Russian also.

7. I told Rainer they were an angel for sending me the link and they said, “You’re an angel. I’m not an angel, I’m an earthly delight.”

8.  The earthquake which crushes an entire population under the rubble of its houses; the river in swollen spate sweeping away the corpses of the drowned peasants along with the bodies of their cattle and the rafters torn from their roofs; the glorious army which slaughters all who resist, takes others prisoner, pillaging by right of the sword, praising God to the roar of cannon; all of these are so many terrifying scourges which destroy our belief in eternal justice and any trust we may have been taught to place in divine protection or the power of human reason.

Guy de Maupassant wrote that, but in French.

9. The Taylor Swift earthquake, by which I mean the minor earthquake caused by one of her concerts, is a climate disaster.

10. I feel inspired by Satan in Paradise Lost because after the first long, grueling day of angelic battle the demons fought on the earthly realm, they realized, “If one day, why not eternal days?” Like they could just keep fighting forever with no result and it would be fine.