Three Excerpts from Language Treaty
You watch the Beanie Baby in front of you transform into a real bear then walk onto the patio. You’re on the second floor so when you look out & the bear’s vanished, you don’t know where it’s gone. You’ll never know—it’s one of the great mysteries of your life. Some of the others: what happened to your friend in high school who no one’s heard from since graduation, where’s the Houston Rockets championship hat you haven’t seen in a decade, how did that fallen tree just barely miss crushing you in your sleep when you were eight & the hurricane rolled in. Take everything you don’t know & stuff it all in a box. That box won’t weigh anything—your thoughts are too often empty. But it’ll be a big box & the space inside will hold more than you’ve ever imagined. It’ll hold this sentence too.
Learn to move the mandible.
Speak not of bones,
protons, the unattainable.
If hiding under cuspids, breathe.
Gnash the teeth together.
Or gnash them alone.
Necessary is the alone,
& the tongue,
& the inside of the atom
& the skin & the thighs.
Speak not of our valence.
Speak not of leaving the cloud.
Everything’s wrought together now. At the store, there’s these new hybrid potato chips—Cheeto flavored baked Lays, kettle chips that taste like Funyuns. Everything is crossed with something else, made into these little bits that resemble reality, but aren’t necessarily part of reality. It’s that whole uncanny valley thing—just like a robot can never look just like a human being, I can never love the baby back rib flavored sparkling water the same way I love the baby back rib itself. We have to cross every product, but never in a productive way. Silence the flavor of noise & noise the flavor of silence. An app that tells you to breathe, but scroll one more video & it’s the chorus of a song that you know only because half the app has become the chorus of that song. If it started from the beginning, you’d have no idea what it is.
Justin Carter’s first book, Brazos, is forthcoming from Belle Point Press in 2024. His poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, and other spaces. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.
