Two Poems
by Catherine Meng

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Season 1 Episode 12

Free plants were everywhere
some succulents, some medicinal, some poison

don’t judge a plant

maybe your torch is out & you don’t know
all of a sudden you’re living with altered states

sticking their tongues out to taste you.
Boo!  Ick!  Don’t lick me!

I’ve been thriving a millennia on silence, some wind
& the occasional polar bear/ it’s not perfect

but the roots! The roots are akin to tendrils,
as infinite as the world wide web

what your brother grew into is a whole other site
you haven’t checked in 2 years.

What Archibald said to Squiggy gets retold by the fire
same way keystrokes enter themselves into empty fields

today’s date is anyone’s guess.
Once you tap the right vein you don’t want to leave it

you grow toward it
maybe it’s a series of buildings, a plateau, a bridge, or a person.

Maybe you prefer a special driveway
to any other place on earth

Season 1 Episode 17

The sun is our gauzy derangement

a shiny unstoppable raving through the jungle

like a grieving mother with a limp.

I read My Interesting Childhood

I read My Interesting Life in a College Town

I read My Interesting Year Abroad

& finally I am ready to be possessed.

This starts dividing off like a flatworm

into other problematic flatworms.

Foreshadowing of radio tower

transmits radio waves.  There is no god

and we are his prophets.  We evoke the forms

& breathe upon them.  We watch the season

spin on one toe until the next season

starts spinning.  In flashback the city is

a magazine ad with lights & hotels

 glued onto it.  The dark pits

in an EKG of this are us.  Conversing

with ferns & burnt forest floors some knew

where spores were, others strung lovers like beads. 

One sorry sap used fish nets to catch

seagulls & tie notes to their legs.
…

In after times there was no self-reference or wanderlust –

we lay like sleeping llama, drowsing with our hooves in the bay.

…

Just when ‘Identity’ had reached an end                                 

a map appeared fully intact & deftly rendered.

Atop our beach, a star, as if to beacon wisemen.

Now anyone with a dream of courage

could gain knowledge of the region.  We became

one nation at the center of the world.