UPSIDE-DOWN INFINITIES

I can go out
now to small skies
filled with government
birds and dig
a hole in the earth
so round you
could fit
oxygen perfectly
and I’d hold my
breath roundly
like the shape of
time, some say
or time twisted
like a rope or
cleat knot
I came at the
beginning of what begs
help, uncle, fire
everywhere and
sorrow in the melt
death to creases folds
corners edges pledges
plead lead deal lead
dead dye dna, and I
virus, death to viral
long live sun ra, long
live earth, long live
the ouroboros
of rhymed thought
burrowed at the base
of that tree, long
live the snake and its rattle
thick in the mouth

***

history’s rubber finger
dusting the baron bookcase, cut
from the wood of a tree
whose name I don’t know,
it’s red you see
and stained like the
knuckles of a prize fighter,
never understood Rocky I, II, or III
The Last Picture Show I saw
my mother for the first time
in yellow light the swallow tail
fixed itself to a bud
she told me to bring
a camera to the funeral
photography’s not really my thing
but looking around is, or no difference
I want to behave like ancient geometry
which takes the shape of a glacial erratic
we live beside one on March Rd
covered in lichen that breathe
when we are not noticing the living
or the dead, yes both, simultaneously
harmonic like the baleen of a whale
sifting through the whole notes
of a zero echoing through the soul of
M. Young, we are relatively
and tomorrow I will and
what math are you?
a poem is a line
and a line is forever
human body metronome
infinities upside down
the woodpecker as an event
microtonal birdsong, this year also
a cicada year, just so just so
this year, as Z would say,
“in any other era”
how spaces ask so few
and so muchly
in all directions

***

What kind of goddamn room is this?
Walls, four of them
blank stare towards an anxious
corner caught between thought
and its parataxis, I ought not lift
a finger for the light
switch but for the fifth dimension
of celestial light
to become human
leave humans
to become a catch all
or release, in the middle
of becoming, a co
implying others
w/ small apertures
the edges of the diaphragm
blades can bend and disperse
light waves just before they reach
the eye. Photographers
call it diffraction, I’m bad
at division, that to look
into the abyss is to be
looking smack dab
at star matter, which is
to say, look here: I am
3.96 x 10 −8 light years away
thinking I want to visit
the Earth only
after its next
apocalypse, clouds
perhaps will survive.
So blow, wind.

THESE ARE THE DAYS OF DARKLY NOON

burn the red candles down to their wicks
you will need a type of love
that turns inside out
sideways and upside down in its
understanding, poetics of
occult, handwriting not
phone, not
does it matter
but does it change us
the way a sugar ant will make traces
along the screen all day crazy
me for paying attention why are we
animals so automatic
in our violences

Catherine Corbett Bresner (they/she) is a human being living in Western MA. They are the author of the chapbooks The Merriam Webster Series (2012) and some break a / others say do (Press Brake, 2025), and the full-length poetry collections Can We Anything We See (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), the empty season (Diode Editions, 2018), and the artist book Everyday Eros (Mount Analogue, 2017).