Homecoming (Catullus 31)

Towers like salamanders glisten on the island,

drawn straight by the glass-grey sea and storm walls.

Planes stack upward in the vernacular of the idiom

of accrual’s false security, debt without time.

For what is ease but acceptance of the yoke

by small iterations into the unconscious

where intellect’s tide recedes from a shoreline

from which we walk, another’s debris.

That’s what I see when I feel you beneath

the white belly of the toxicants I ride to arrivals,

gazing out portside at the natural world,

the middle act in a long line of suicide pacts.

Or Not (Catullus 52)

Look around. You can’t persist.

Malignancy fat on the arbiters’ bench.

Dismemberment in the embassy rug.

Quid est and why, the monkey said.

Mike Lala (1987–) is a poet of the late American republic. He's the author of the poetry volumes The Unreal City and Exit Theater, a contributing translator to Tales of Dionysus: The Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis, and his performance and installation works include Whale Fall (with Iris McCloughan and Nobutaka Aozaki), Madeleines: Tell Me What It Was Like (with Iris McCloughan), and Infinite Odyssey (with Homer).