This machine is a lippy huckleberry;

get out your brain:

He that adze his fleshy blade 

hacking a deep plane

chops a field to the sore.

Not a wager behind him, he that mad drafter

swings untranslatable 

hooks through the cadmium, the age-dense ore. 

He, that unfinished, 

that closer on the track to the ancients

turns up the masto-

don bones, copperheads pithed 

and looped round

his handle, stopping just to pitch the fangs,  

calamine the wounds, 

unwind the serpents, slam his dark rum 

red, resumes.

Chippy, this machine—a cannulated cow

groaning, its embedded 

sources flagged—before the program,

the masters had sewn death, 

mined life. 

To see those decorated cost-cutters writhe

and clench, their monsters’

teeth tilled up, scorched, fetal,

the seedword silicon legion gone rotten

while Henry—

it looks like—there is no—

even a pink bot need its gutters cleaned,

else networks flood

and the untranslated lines go glitching

along. Can you tell 

again this succulent helper, this mucous

radiance this screen

tell dear oracle tell in the compiled tongue 

what you mean 

to do when you find Jack Henry

was a ghost man?

 

---

Ryan Harper is an Assistant Professor of the Practice at Fairfield University-Bellarmine in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He is the author of My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018). Some of his recent poems and essays have appeared in Citron Review, Fourteen Hills, The Talon Review, Vilas Avenue, Vita Poetica, and elsewhere. Ryan is the creative arts editor of American Religion Journal.