—I breathe indiscriminately // I kill the same //
just as air does now moving through me // oxygen unstrung & grafted
to blood // waste product even now in these words // thinking O tall tree
in the ear keep churning // you are such a beautiful kite carrying me
elsewhere I forget I am just another engine idling // I don’t even worry
sometimes the electricity I use keying my avatar through the ether // or
wondering if any of the molecules pouring out of me carried Rilke // too //
to such levels of popularity & despair // such ecstasy // I am so outside
myself right now I must be tactile // first god again // always first gods
again // Orphée in Kanpur // in Faridabad // where all of us live // in
micrograms per cubic meter // in asthma & scavenger cells // in
emphysema //—O footprint-footprint-footprint—rickshaw morphing
into tuk tuk // my exhalations must be in the neighbor’s dog by now // &
then out again // moving east // because that’s where all the wind
is going // over & through the trees // carrying this dispersed liquid
aerosol I am forever expressing toward you
Dennis Hinrichsen
Dennis Hinrichsen is the winner of Grid Poetry Prize for 2020 for his collection This Is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else To Go which will appear later in the fall. His most recent work is [q / lear], a chapbook from Green Linden Press, and Skin Music, winner of the 2014 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press. From May 2017 - April 2019, he served as the first Poet Laureate of the Greater Lansing [MI] area.
