Martin Rock
Winter 2023 | Poetry
Five Poems from
Infinite Scroll
A voyeur knows what kind of viewer he is,
but looking at [ ], you are not
always a voyeur. Neither are you always a
witness, nor any other single kind of
watcher. Your implied identity slips with
each stroke of the thumb.
— Dana Tortorici
Here’s the problem:
You think money
is bigger than language.
You think language
is bigger than the world.
You think the world
of yourself, of money;
of language you think
your own can justify
the world you’ve made
by thinking; primarily,
that money is so large
even the still-wet leaves
account for nothing
so much as the gardener’s
fee for tending them,
for cutting them off,
for making them disappear.
From bed I scroll myself to the kitchen
upwards I think myself up
to the office or down
it doesn’t matter my body barely moves
it’s like flying thousands of feet
above an empty city
there’s so much to see without
focusing anywhere I turn inwardly
to jelly & keep scanning the jelly
explodes a nebula into mist
the horizon slips further away
what a blessing to have everything
so close I can nearly taste it
your body so close we’re both at the bottom
of our own rectangles
we keep scrolling to find ourselves
inside ourselves beside one another
we’re both weightless above
this groundlessness the one that
teaches how far to dig how far
to never stop digging knock knock
There are holes in the West the size of genealogies the
size of historical novels of battleships in the West there are holes the size of wind patterns mouths of hungry ghosts the size of Amazons of bank accounts we gobble up code we swallow code we absorb it into ourselves and become entirely new bodies in the West a machine reveals the broken-up materials of ships underfoot the West is a mouth that consumes species and regurgitates code it bubbles forth on the screens of mothers in the West that bequeath their children the inevitability of entering the earth eventually and forever what grows does so irreconcilable to matter it consumes us we see only growth see numbers become death the great feast we are reduced to a ledger of bland indistinguishable snacks
diary of mistakes, entry #2:
behind the shed I was twelve
[ ]’s mother
caught us in the dirt
looking at porn I meant
fourteen I meant Hustler
we spent hours I meant
our hands were filthy
inside the house was a film
of grime on the walls
y'all should know she said
a real woman’s body I felt sick
she was so towering thick
I had to get home y’all can see
me naked I got on my bike
blackout fast heart racing
the next time I saw a nipple
was at the same house
[ ]’s dad bought
a computer we watched
a woman appear one
pixel-height line at a time
the modem shrieking
out the birth of something
beautiful contorted into
something also beautiful
The West is a product
of desire without reason
a kind of unattainable taunt
even Outside is a brand
everyone sleeps in the West
technology is a blessing we forget
to put down we sleep in we forget how to dream
we think about ownership
over even each other’s bodies
even the sky in the West even the ocean
belongs to the economy
the ground moves under us
like styrofoam plates the taste in our mouths
is plastic the West sings to us
it opens its mouth to make
promises something beautiful and perfect
something finally
and disquietingly fulfilling something
just up ahead beyond the next frame
something always just there
when finally it blossoms
we’ll be waiting anxiously to cut
and eat the bloom to suck
the fruit and crush the bitter seed
Martin Rock is the author of Residuum, Editor’s Choice for the 2015 Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize, and Dear Mark, an ekphrastic chapbook in response to the work of Mark Rothko, published by Brooklyn Arts Press. His work appears in Best American Experimental Writing, Best New Poets, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Conduit, Waxwing, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Winner of the Donald Barthelme prize in poetry and recipient of multiple writing fellowships, Martin holds an MFA from New York University, where he was Editor in Chief of Washington Square Review, and a PhD from the University of Houston, where he was Managing Editor of Gulf Coast. Having taught writing, literature, and ecocriticism at NYU, University of Houston, California College of the Arts in Oakland, and Berkeley College in Manhattan, he is now a Faculty Lecturer at UCSD’s Seventh College, where he teaches at the intersection of writing and climate action. With Kevin Prufer and Wayne Miller, Martin co-directs the Unsung Masters series, which recently published Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master.