"What's Greater than Gamma Rays" and "Because there's too Much TV to Choose"
What’s Greater than Gamma Rays?
For her feathery profile I stalk I fit
this city and its moon in my closed fist
To love her I stuff
hearts inside my eyes—cartoons but pumping
real blood too—real and red
as a child in summer
Come on!
I am as real as a flag
and as fake as folded in the dark
behind a locked door
But O! When it opens! There is confetti
and dancing—a black space to un-blank—
We could fill our thought bubbles with pie
till our tummies say no or
the world ends
Maybe we will
But I'm looking the wrong way at the sun
like not knowing how to say I'm alive
I'm not sure if it makes me better or worse to say this
I should probably graduate to full-on nerd and
be done with it but what
will heart what comes next?
Why or when to touch her hidden sun or how to snap
a pic for her
to like on Instagram?
Someone please give me a hand
mail me maybe in the real box with the junk with the
to-be-recycled
the key to this door
Because there’s too Much TV to Choose
I watch Planet Earth again I drift
like snow
between mountain peaks
to find the safest place to dream
I need to fidget a little to find
my meal elsewhere
there's some humor in
this descent—down the nursery slopes
I go—as in making
my first descent my first mistake
I feel like an ibex—like a new kid—but
I may be a newborn valley
reaching
to hold all my oh-so-vulnerable dreams
if winter if death if the prey from
far away
blurs
but I’m an instinct I am the music rising—
a bird in a ten-meter drop from
desert rocks
scattering myself makes me hard
to target
all you can do is wait
here in the flat world
here prattling in your inaction
you may observe a battle between eagles
over the carrion of half-frozen fox
browning the whitest snow as you
might imagine
wanting
ice cream
yes I guess Wallace Stevens there really is
a mind of winter to regard this
![Christopher Shipman Christopher Shipman](https://www.unlikelystories.org/sites/default/files/shippy_bio_pic.jpeg)
Christopher Shipman (he/him) lives on Eno, Sappony, & Shakori land in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he teaches literature and creative writing at New Garden Friends School & plays drums in The Goodbye Horses. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, Fence, Pedestal, Poetry Magazine, Rattle (online), & elsewhere. His experimental play Metaphysique D’ Ephemera has been staged at four universities. Getting Away with Everything (Unlikely Books, 2021), in collaboration with Vincent Cellucci, is his most recent collection. More at www.cshipmanwriting.com.