Louie land

Louie Land teaches creative writing, English, and film at Susquehanna University. His work has appeared in Solum Journal, FRiGG, Heron Tree, and elsewhere. He earned his MFA in fiction at the University of Idaho. He is at work on a novel and a book of poems. An active blues-jazz guitarist, he released his first album, Afterglow, in 2019, which can be found at louieland.bandcamp.com.

Too Tired for Anger, I have Become Obsessed

With the trappings

of what we’ll call progress: chutes

splitting sidewalks into high-rises

of concrete and metal and glass

in a motion towards transparency

With the names of particles

I save for poems—photons

bear light    gluons carry force    fermions

are particles of matter—but whose

function I fail to comprehend

beyond the definition

With fatigue as the privilege

of those who have given up the fight

or had it kicked from them

With sublimation

With the smell of sulfur

With an interview with Jim Hall

saying I feel like Miles

could play silence better

than some guys could play

notes

With transmissions beamed forty-three

million miles between Earth

and Curiosity, the twenty-minute absence

before the rover’s response

With bottling our sun in green glass—

what my grandmother calls Depression

ware—and pawning jade lanterns

for a dollar and a quarter to anyone

who asks for a light

With who owns the water particles

crystalizing from our breath

after they leave our vision to be

inhaled by another

With how energy that spins

atoms into suns marks lovers

as shadowed phantoms on brick

With gestures towards leaving:

the lacing of boots, the clearing

of throats

With the light pollution that backscatters

across the atmosphere

into translucence, cities burning, obscuring

nebulae

With the rusted shopping cart

covered in a blue tarp down

the street, how it seems, in the rain,

a man in a slicker of sapphires

bending across a stroller

to brush his daughter’s soaked hair

Read Louie’s work and more in Solum Journal Volume III.