Compendium of Indifference
In Bogotá, detergent wastes into the water.
Toxic foam clouds congeal and catch
in the autumn breeze. On a news report
a man jokes I’ve heard of acid rain
but never acid clouds. My therapist says
that I, too, deflect trauma with humor.
When the avalanche blows across town
we’ll both see how funny that laughter is.
Between oil wells and rest stop diners
a tumbleweed catches on the rotting
carcass of a longhorn. Vultures pick
open his stomach cavity, revealing
treasures: acrid yellow pus and teems
of maggots. He gorged himself to death
on Astroturf. On Wendy’s brand straws.
There’s a saying in Acadia that the wingless
bat doesn’t fall far from the tree. Its skin
fused fully circular like a grotesque frisbee.
Another example of phyla without class
or order. Get it? Each year the sunset more
irradiated, more gorgeous. Sure, the ozone
is almost depleted, and our eyes will sear
shut with toxins, but at least the last glimpses
will be memorable. Isn’t this all in the pursuit
of love? In the heartland, three meteorology
students crash while chasing a tornado. There’s
something to be said for the tiny distinctions
between words: running into vs. running after.
I imagine two of them at least must have been
in love, with each other & with the thrill. There’s
no way to be impartial, no way to write
A compendium of indifference without loving
something too much. Once, while taking
a leadership training at Philmont Scout Ranch
a friend had a grizzly bear wander into his campsite.
He had been careless and left food out &
the grizzly was hungry and opportunistic,
optioning to sit on the picnic table, eating Teddy Grahams.
Under the right conditions cannibalism becomes
natural. In the sugaring spring, I used to eat human
shaped husks of maple syrup, gnawing at
their appendages first, keeping intact their vital organs.
There was a clinicality to my cruelness.
When I think of the frontier, I mostly see
video game cutscenes. I see myself skinning
the pixels off a mountain lion, shooting someone
in the head in slow motion. The biggest critique
of augmented reality is how we’ll eventually forget
our own, the way alcohol blurs back
dopamine reception. Distilled down, we become
scared of the natural and embrace our biomimicries.
At the Desert Botanical Museum my mother is amazed
With how it is someone’s job to wipe and dust
the hand-blown glass cacti. How quickly we’ve relieved
nature of its nature, electing the most optimal
conditions for a conditional tense. The future
hardly exists I read once on a bumper sticker.
I can’t remember what car it was. These things
matter. On a Prius it is a sigh of defeat.
On a Range Rover a celebratory exultation.
My mouth hums like a Prius when I tell you
that nothing I say will fix anything, that my words
are ornaments for the apocalypse. One fine
morning, we might see the last colors leave
the sky. If we want to, we can take bets
on which the last of us will be, the cockroaches
or the Twinkies. The Range Rover move is to scream
I told you so in front of the White House. It was all
but said when we started seriously talking
about not putting, but leaving, a man on the moon.
It was all but said when the highest definition
a screen could go was greater than our eyes.
In a way the beauty of the moon was always
how you could never photograph it. For a while
I was only attracted to girls with astigmatisms
because it meant they could see something I
could not see. Now, I see how this led to me
all but hating myself; how it led me to believing
that any of this could and would be thrown away.
Toxic foam clouds congeal and catch
in the autumn breeze. On a news report
a man jokes I’ve heard of acid rain
but never acid clouds. My therapist says
that I, too, deflect trauma with humor.
When the avalanche blows across town
we’ll both see how funny that laughter is.
Between oil wells and rest stop diners
a tumbleweed catches on the rotting
carcass of a longhorn. Vultures pick
open his stomach cavity, revealing
treasures: acrid yellow pus and teems
of maggots. He gorged himself to death
on Astroturf. On Wendy’s brand straws.
There’s a saying in Acadia that the wingless
bat doesn’t fall far from the tree. Its skin
fused fully circular like a grotesque frisbee.
Another example of phyla without class
or order. Get it? Each year the sunset more
irradiated, more gorgeous. Sure, the ozone
is almost depleted, and our eyes will sear
shut with toxins, but at least the last glimpses
will be memorable. Isn’t this all in the pursuit
of love? In the heartland, three meteorology
students crash while chasing a tornado. There’s
something to be said for the tiny distinctions
between words: running into vs. running after.
I imagine two of them at least must have been
in love, with each other & with the thrill. There’s
no way to be impartial, no way to write
A compendium of indifference without loving
something too much. Once, while taking
a leadership training at Philmont Scout Ranch
a friend had a grizzly bear wander into his campsite.
He had been careless and left food out &
the grizzly was hungry and opportunistic,
optioning to sit on the picnic table, eating Teddy Grahams.
Under the right conditions cannibalism becomes
natural. In the sugaring spring, I used to eat human
shaped husks of maple syrup, gnawing at
their appendages first, keeping intact their vital organs.
There was a clinicality to my cruelness.
When I think of the frontier, I mostly see
video game cutscenes. I see myself skinning
the pixels off a mountain lion, shooting someone
in the head in slow motion. The biggest critique
of augmented reality is how we’ll eventually forget
our own, the way alcohol blurs back
dopamine reception. Distilled down, we become
scared of the natural and embrace our biomimicries.
At the Desert Botanical Museum my mother is amazed
With how it is someone’s job to wipe and dust
the hand-blown glass cacti. How quickly we’ve relieved
nature of its nature, electing the most optimal
conditions for a conditional tense. The future
hardly exists I read once on a bumper sticker.
I can’t remember what car it was. These things
matter. On a Prius it is a sigh of defeat.
On a Range Rover a celebratory exultation.
My mouth hums like a Prius when I tell you
that nothing I say will fix anything, that my words
are ornaments for the apocalypse. One fine
morning, we might see the last colors leave
the sky. If we want to, we can take bets
on which the last of us will be, the cockroaches
or the Twinkies. The Range Rover move is to scream
I told you so in front of the White House. It was all
but said when we started seriously talking
about not putting, but leaving, a man on the moon.
It was all but said when the highest definition
a screen could go was greater than our eyes.
In a way the beauty of the moon was always
how you could never photograph it. For a while
I was only attracted to girls with astigmatisms
because it meant they could see something I
could not see. Now, I see how this led to me
all but hating myself; how it led me to believing
that any of this could and would be thrown away.
Rewilding
Sometimes, before the morning,
when the starlight
sits on the lawn, neither violet
nor midnight, a coyote,
trots the sidewalk.
A vagrant looking for the place
he once called home.
A few streets over, a red-tailed hawk
divebombs postal workers,
thrashes talons into Amazon packages,
leaves animal control
to stake out the scene.
They wonder how they could,
on a philosophical level, evict
that which precedes them, deny
a bird its perch. How does anyone
bring a child into a world
this far gone? You tell me
to watch for the little things: lichen
eating through leaf litter,
the lavender haze of a sky
after a volcanic eruption.
How blue flowers are the first
to emerge after a forest fire,
a tiny bucket brigade
passing water across a hillside.
when the starlight
sits on the lawn, neither violet
nor midnight, a coyote,
trots the sidewalk.
A vagrant looking for the place
he once called home.
A few streets over, a red-tailed hawk
divebombs postal workers,
thrashes talons into Amazon packages,
leaves animal control
to stake out the scene.
They wonder how they could,
on a philosophical level, evict
that which precedes them, deny
a bird its perch. How does anyone
bring a child into a world
this far gone? You tell me
to watch for the little things: lichen
eating through leaf litter,
the lavender haze of a sky
after a volcanic eruption.
How blue flowers are the first
to emerge after a forest fire,
a tiny bucket brigade
passing water across a hillside.
Eli Karren is a poet and educator based in Austin, TX. His work can be found in the Harvard Review, Cimarron Review, Free State Review, and the anthology Turn it Up: Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip Hop. He is a graduate of the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.