Clade Song 9

Making the Garden Extremely Intimate

Find the adaptations of the extreme animals.
Elephant trunk, penguin flipper, shrimp claw, sperm whale spout, cuttlefish skin.
We talk too much. Not enough. What's this about?
Missing time. Able to see through. Flashes. Not letting water flow.
We have to go away. We can't stay here. What we are
we’re not in the year 2999 when the dinosaurs come back.
With at least 2 kilos of glorification. Striking exhibit.
There are many ways to be extreme right now without waiting.
Being really big, small, loud, fast or smart are some ways to be extreme.
Be a blue whale or a mosquitofish. Peregrine falcon, emperor penguin or black heron.
Let's just list some parts without making connections.
Tentacle. Transparent. Flipper. Waterproof. Snout. It's about dissolving bodies.
Remembering how we’re this special swimming in waves of time.
All of us kings riding on a wreck of a boat. It's definitely unstoppable.

Thomas Osatchoff, together with family, is building a self-sustaining home near a waterfall. Recent poems have appeared in Breakwater Review, FOLIO, HCE Review, and elsewhere. In 2014, as the Ruble collapsed, Thomas walked through Moscow's wet streets to the Bulgakov museum. Inside the museum, a cat that could be thought to be the very one from Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Behemoth, who is able to transform into human form, stoked the fires of a root question. Namely, how can we sublimate society? Thomas makes poetry based on the belief that it can help us outstrip our hierarchical history.