

The Jupiter Review
Star, Chemical, Futile, and Irreverent
Carl Boon
My goal’s to write a poem
in a language I can’t write. It would be
an elevated form of action,
a postmodern mischief, an ode
to my mother who thinks
she knows me. It would be unfriendly
and filled with broken flowers
and inadequate conjunctions.
It would be faintly Paraguayan if
there’s such a thing as faintly
Paraguayan or faintly anything. But
of course you couldn’t know—
who could?—and I’d amass
a gathering of faithful readers
in a lauded magazine and be interviewed
twice in the Paris Review. Perhaps
the New York Times. The point is
I’d be very famous, a concern
of those critics who can’t decide
what a poem actually is, arbiter
of language, often needled and
even sometimes villified. But they
would’ve forgotten the poem itself,
brutal and a refuge both, star, chemical,
futile, and irreverent, which is what
I want to be tonight—hanged by them
on a tendril in a quiet, foreign place.
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Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.