Susana H. Case
Two Poems
The World as We Know It
after Olafur Eliasson’s project, Earth Perspectives
on Instagram during COVID-19
Focus on the dot in the center
of the pink and orange earth,
then the blank surface
of your wall, because you have
been staying within your walls.
Test the afterimage
as you become the artist,
new world in new colors.
Repeat nine times, for each
earth, an earth that does not
have nine lives, and think
about what you’re doing,
this vastness full of us crazies.
Think: what is the perspective
of a thawing glacier: does it know
that it’s dying and taking
us with it. Think about the raw
emotion of the Mariana Trench,
deepest in our existence,
full of plastics,
and the other dots: the Ganges,
Greenland, the Great Barrier Reef.
Do you feel any way differently,
maybe more alliterative.
We’re all dying, and it’s all dying,
people, coral, water, creatures,
on every dot and not,
every tilted axis. Even Chernobyl
with its returning wolves
and Przewalski’s horses in their
pudgy, feral beauty can’t save us.
What will we want in the After.
Think.
Corona April
A red bird lands on the terrace rail
and pecks at some chips
of paint this rainy day.
(Lately, I have to remind myself
to look out the window.)
The bird that represents happiness.
No, wait—that’s the blue one.
How ironic to negate the blues
in that sad way. Red bird,
I have nothing for you,
just the cigarette butts blown in
from my neighbor upstairs.
My mother used to feed the birds
that flew to her porch,
more new ones every day,
she claimed. It became an impossible
obligation in her later years.
Red birds, blue birds, all birds,
like you,
they just took and took and took.
—Submitted on 04/23/2020
Susana H. Case is the author of the poetry collections Dead Shark on the N Train (Broadstone Books, 2020), Body Falling, Sunday Morning (Milk and Cake Press, 2019); Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press, 2019); Erasure, Syria (Recto y Verso Editions, 2018); 4 Rms w Vu (Mayapple Press, 2014); Earth and Below (Anaphora Literary Press, 2013); Salem in Séance (WordTech Communications, 2013); and Elvis Presley’s Hips & Mick Jagger’s Lips (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012). Case is also the author of the poetry chapbooks Manual of Practical Sexual Advice (Kattywompus Press, 2011), The Cost of Heat (Pecan Grove Press, 2010), Hiking the Desert in High Heels (RightHandPointing, 2005), Anthropologist in Ohio (Main Street Rag, 2005), and The Scottish Café (Slapering Hol Press, 2002). Her poems have appeared in Calyx, The Cortland Review, Portland Review, Potomac Review, Rattle, and other journals. With a BA from NYU and a PhD in sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center, Case is a professor at the New York Institute of Technology.
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