Jake Sheff
A Confluence of Maple, a Resurgence of History
There was no way she evolved
In a world without clouds,
In a world without hippies
Like Euler’s Equation, Stalingrad,
The daily Metamucil tablet to keep you
Regular; it’s my subjective truth,
My requisite canyon that drains the inchoate
Of lymph and quicksilver destined for
The proto-amputation of voice box and carol…
My imperiled Miranda! – on the dogmatic veranda.
There are doubts and delusions over
15 billion years old that are undetectable
To any orderly structure that exists.
A snow leopard is slinking through
A benzene storm, but the presence of myth
Pervades the surrounding text, and tortures
Reality as it reads the revelations
Of a robotic race. The sun is a manmade
Purveyor of psychology’s benefits; it isn’t
Critical in the least. My imperiled Miranda:
The hula-hoop cooper is dodging your wrath
By fusing emotion and reflex
Into novel and massive rhythms
That pass, quantity-less, through recently
Recalibrated string-gender systems.
O, my imperiled Miranda, the treatise
Was propaganda; there was no way your pernicious
Dahlia could speculate for you, your normative
Godwit segue (pixelated) to the preposterous
Savannah, your tardigrade act as regent
With graham cracker proselytizing, axioms
And ladybug liniments for your recruits,
Those omelets with their souvenir coryzas.
Jake Sheff is a major and pediatrician in the US Air Force, married with a daughter and six pets. Currently home is the Mojave Desert. Poems of Jake’s are in or forthcoming from Radius, The Ekphrastic Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Cossack Review and elsewhere. He won 1st place in the 2017 SFPA speculative poetry contest and was a finalist in the Rondeau Roundup’s 2017 triolet contest. Two of his poems have been nominated for the 2018 Best of the Net Anthology. His chapbook is Looting Versailles (Alabaster Leaves Publishing).
Editor’s Note: The image is a collage of Euler’s Identity, a benzene ring, rain, a spiral galaxy, and a snow leopard.
