Olzmann - Contradictions in the Design

2016 by Matthew Olzmann All rights reserved Printed in the United States 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Alice James Books are published by Alice James Poetry Cooperative, Inc., an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington. Alice James Books 114 Prescott Street Farmington, ME 04938 www.alicejamesbooks.org Names: Olzmann, Matthew, author. Title: Contradictions in the design / Matthew Olzmann. Description: Farmington, ME : Alice James Books, [2016] Identifiers: LCCN 2016011686 (print) | LCCN 2016018428 (ebook) | ISBN 9781938584275 (softcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781938584404 (eBook) Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / American / Asian American. | POETRY / American / General. | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Marriage.

Classification: LCC PS3615.L96 A6 2016 (print) | LCC PS3615.L96 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016011686 Alice James Books gratefully acknowledges support from individual donors, private foundations, the University of Maine at Farmington, and the National Endowment for the Arts. C OVER PHOTOGRAPH BY J OHN C HERVINSKY WWW.CHERVINSKY.ORG N OTE TO THE R EADER Alice James Books encourages you to calibrate your e-reader device settings using the line of characters below as a guide, which optimizes the line length and character size: crumbling buildings in Detroit alone. Among them: a furnace factory, Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. Doing this will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accomodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems may be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the line break will be marked with a shallow indent.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications, in which these poems, or versions of them, first appeared.

B O D Y	Nothing Gets Through to You Jackass
Connotation Press: An Online Artifact	A Calm Eerie War Could Also Spell We Are a Miracle Possum Drop The Discipline Monkey
Crab Orchard Review	You want to hold everything in place, but
Drunken Boat	The Millihelen Wreckage Gallery
failbetter.com	The Skull of a Mastodon
Fogged Clarity	Imaginary Shotguns Meditation of a Foot Soldier Nearing Medusas Sculpture Garden Build, Now, a Monument
Forklift, Ohio	The Man Who Was Mistaken
Hobart	The Skull of a Unicorn
Hyphen	Astronomers Locate a New Planet
Indiana Review	Ill Forgive John Keats, but Not You
Gulf Coast	The Skull of an Unidentified Dinosaur Elegy where Small Towns Are Obscured by Mountains Contradictions in the Design
Kenyon Review	In the Gallery of American Violence
Kenyon Review Online	The Gallery of Severe Head Injuries
Lantern Review	The Well The Gallery of Every Living Thing
Mead: The Magazine of Literature & Libations	Prayer for an Unremarkable Day
Muzzle	Still Life with Heart Extracted from the Body of a Horse
New England Review	Replica of The Thinker
Poetry Northwest	The Minotaurs Supervillains Nate Brown is Looking for a Moose
Qualm	Elegy in Which I Am Unable to Travel Faster Than the Speed of Sound
Salt Hill	Engine in the Shape of a Tiny Metal Dog
Souwester	The Gallery of Small Innovations
Toad	The Raising of Lazarus
The Texas Review	The Department of Doubt
Tongue	Prayer Near a Farm by Black Mountain, North Carolina: 11:36 P.M ., Early May
Waxwing	Consider All the Things Youve Known but Now Know Differently

The Department of Doubt was also printed as a broadside as part of the Vandercooked Poetry Nights series. Nothing Gets through to You, Jackass also appeared in Best of the Net 2013 (Sundress Publications). Thank you to Tarfia Faizullah, Jamaal May, Patrick Rosal, and Ross White, whose insight and advice helped me at different times while writing these poems. Thank you to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and Kundiman for their generosity and support. My Asheville writing group: Melissa Crowe, Luke Hankins, Briar DeHaven, and Brian Sneeden. Carey Salerno, Alyssa Neptune, and the staff at Alice James Books for bringing this book into the world.

Cathy Linh Che for reading an earlier version of this manuscript. And Vievee Francis for being the first reader for every poem in this book. For Kurt and Mary Ann Olzmann I went to the museum where they had all the heads and armsfrom the statues that are in all the other museums. S TEVEN W RIGHT When man wanted to make a machine that would walkhe created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg. G UILLAUME A POLLINAIRE REPLICA OF THE THINKER By the doorstep of the museum, the Duplicate is frustrated. Like the offspring of a rock star or senator, no matter what he does, its never enough. He only wants to think dignified thoughts, important thoughts, thoughts that will imprint like an artists signature on the memory of mankind. But its difficult, because when he thinks, his head is filled with iron and bronze, not neurons and God.

I, too, feel like that. You know how it works when you make a photocopy of a photocopy? The eye fights to see the original, which appears blurred in each new version. Each morning, I sit at the kitchen table the way my father mustve years ago. Ive got my oatmeal and coffee, my newspaper and blank stare. The Replica digs his right elbow into his left thigh, his chin into his right fist, and then he thinks as hard as his maker will allow. He tries to envision patterns among celestial bodies, the mysteries of Christ, X + Y, crossword puzzles, free will.

The expression on his face: somewhere between agony and falling asleep. Yet he holds this pose as if no one will notice what frauds we are, as if some world around him is about to make sense, some answer has almost arrived. Almost. I.