12. 09. 2021
“hadal zone in the age of deindustrialization”
&
“communiqué”
Dominick Knowles
hadal zone in the age of deindustrialization
there’s a smokestack at the bottom of the mariana trench,
there are people there, and clearance racks, and tendon-long
whispers. hedgefunds stretch along tinnitus cliffs; the aubade
splits open like a clam.
we blame it on the free market. we blame it on the gram-
mar of surfaces, on the ruined seafloor where a fish rots
from the head down, dreaming the disease that would
drown her in debt.
my boss denies me a raise. the cops find him at the bottom
of the trench, sucking on a smokestack, screeching out mating
calls to an ancient seadevil. he looks like a blind machine
sleepwalking off the edge of a motel balcony, if the motel
balcony was a tectonic plate, or wet metal slept.
O pondeater, O creditwhirler, O deepsea shiftmanager,
read the moon back to me:
give what’s left of its light a name,
terraform the waves
to the density of wage—
communiqué
a soul of worn
enamel, of tongue
that seeps, that b-
ends across, rocks
like traffic lights
in octave wind
a
lifted
cart
that
squeals
through
neon lots,
stung gust
splintering
hostile benches,
branches, beams,
paystubs, heads of
dented lettuce,
rental vans
a riot of
pipes that
bursts from
stripmall
stucco:
tongues
the soul
whose
mumbled
weather
flails b-
eyond the
gutters,
stuffed
with debt
Dominick Knowles is an adjunct professor, PhD candidate, and poetry editor of Protean Magazine. They are the co-author (with Mathilda Cullen) of Stanzas for Four Hands: An Ophanim, a collection of poems against empire.