Soham Patel

1 poem & soundscape

Listen it’s my day off

I recognize the music playing

Here at Don Chignon

Near the Bergen Street stop off

The 3 train waiting for Brenda

To regroup @homeb4 receiving me

It’s The Shins’ Phantom Limb

Alone I acquire two orders of elote then one house

Margarita then just one more but worse is I just got

On an airplane and today is the day of the climate

Strike 6 dollars plus 8 plus tip how deep’s my carbon 

Footprint for the cost of a magazine subscription

But now by the second round I may be unoriginal

Once I found a shiny layered rock on

Brighton beach in the sand

All over the darkness is real though

And oil fueled the plane not a boat

Youth activists gather from 

Afar and I go to happy hour

What’s an ecopoetics of flying 

Echo like during the climate strike

Me, this evening, Friday

September 20, 2019, I see a storefront

Called Kith&remember I have to write a thank

You to Divya but like Jimmie, been so busy

If I am not in conversation

With the next generation &

The ones preceding me

In my communities 

About my day job

Then what am I

Even doing

&Now happy hour is over

And the last song: “I feel it in my bones

23.80          40.00        10+5  +1
        ___11              11
            29

At home Brenda says the poem can save the climate

Crisis and plays “Love is simple” by the Akron/ Family

We are at 596 Bergen Street in the back

Yard we dance with cleomes later

That Sunday during the equinox I hear

Unexpected echoes in the atmosphere I remember

Driving thru Wisco on poetry tour with Lauren and Lewis

We sang so many songs on the road and I made a video 

&@the bookfest JoJo uttered about monogamy, real estate, 

And forever&progeny&change and X too shy wasn’t taking

Interview questions when we were in the Korean

War Memorial Park anyway I always caution under my

Eco-sexuality as raindrops torrid down like a kiss

Did I kiss the cleome w/out consent 

When we were dancing vine and pedals em-

Braced me I will ask when I am back


 

Soham Patel is the author of to afar from afar (The Accomplices), ever really hear it (Subito), and all one in the end--/water (forthcoming from Delete Press).