three poems by kristi maxwell






[the land-based midden overflows, artifact]


the land-based midden overflows, artifact
        on top of biofact, lithic flake alongside lithic
               blade; the ocean-based midden of the octopus,

on the other hand, opens itself to questions,
        post opportunistic feeding of a den’s occupant—
               is the octopus tidying or tithing, making an offering

to the future, to a then (as in “next,” not “ago”);
        the sun-dried octopi of Oia, precarious, in terms of
               how one will use the term “exist” to describe them,

stretched there, suckers unwinking; we have
        obliterated once again the shower-loving drain flies,
               we have mixed baking soda, boiled water, have laid

traps of un-mothered apple cider vinegar,
        but they are determined to exist, with the ancient
               cloaks of their furred wings—kings of outlasting;

a kind of fleshy floorboard, the operculum
        exists, under which a gastropod mollusk hides,
               unlike the undesirable gum flap, a swollen cap

a tooth reluctantly wears—no wisdom in that,
        the mouth a field, needing irrigation, an infection
               checked like a coat, though reversed: taken away after

being picked up; and worm gears and teeth in
        odometers and the earthworms gearing soil
               for growth, earthworms one imagines warm as

the earth warms, hermaphroditic worms unwarned
        hooks exist and interior roads that hooks ride; our
               mothers ask the bait shop owners which worms

would be best for frying (they having read us
       the book How to Eat Fried Worms and us, daring,
               death-dealing), after which we walk home with

nightcrawlers in Styrofoam cups, bright as
        Rasalhague, the brightest star in the serpent-
               bearer Ophiuchus, visible when the night crawls
                       around it, the eyeless dark, not seeing stars exist





[orange without oranges exists, fruitless]


orange without oranges exists, fruitless
orange—opah with their red-orange fins,
torch lilies and the occasional zinnia;
obliviousness exists, obliviousness and
openness to knowing, open as a jackknife

is to opening; Old Spice in the armpits
of so many men; old feuds, limited as
a crumb, unable, ultimately, to expand
bread’s oeuvre; octagons, such as
the umbrella’s bloom best observed

overhead; king oyster mushrooms and
their stems cut to mimic scallops exist
alongside scallops; ossification exists,
the replacement of cartilage with bone,
the self’s anticipated hardening; the dog

of a red-winged boy, the dog called both
Orthos and Orthros, twilight and straight-
ness; the warm-blooded opah with their
red-orange fins, the only known fully
warm-blooded fish, opah, or moonfish,

exist, tire-sized, fast-moving; ostrich eggs
sold at ostrich farms, advertisements for
the world’s largest omelet; mink oil obtained
from the fatty tissue of minks, oiled boots,
oiled boots and organized hikes, outdated

guidebooks; doll-eyed ocelots with their chain
rosette coats; the open-centered rosette of
printmaking, a process color shifted one half row,
just as we shift, overthrown by our late wants,
as if short works optioned for film by our own

impulses, as if original scripts; odds given, the odds
overlooked; obscenity exists, olfactory overload,
questionable obeisance; on one’s knees, again,
with the o of kneecaps recited by the knees’ skin





[oblations and oblate spheroids exist]


oblations and oblate spheroids exist,
the bulging Earth, our planetary stanza,
center-spaced, with the question of author-
ship left open; the observatory of the mind,
spacious, but closed today, closed yesterday,
obsidian dark and cooled off perhaps too
rapidly, encouraged against hard caring,
encouraged to harden; obviating the solo

system’s orientation toward otherness,
toward self’s obverse, the uni- verse un-
versed, the wreck of one shutting down
inter-states, inner states, the interstitial,
the crossing over crossed out; to be as in-
dispensable as the obbligato, to be the sin-
gle instrument tasked with music, to be
not without purpose, but to play and to

play on; to play in one’s town of origin,
under one hundred miles away from the town
the atomic bomb built (like the news news
stations make), Oak Ridge, six-thousand
acres of farmland, repurposed, once federally
owned, to sow now destruction, sow-less,
and solace-mild; the ordinariness of nuclear
evacuation signs, the uselessness; the lick

that is an ephemeral stream, not hardly
ocean’s drool, though spring-fed and salty;
to not give a lick, to occlude such possibility;
that the testicular nests of Montezuma oro-
pendolas exist in the dicotyledonous trees
of Costa Rica, golden pendulum birds
that exist without special status, without
what’s considered notable endangerment;

to exist amidst the ordinary endangerments,
to exist among; lightfast ochre, an ancient
pigment, ubiquitous, ochre and the rusting
earth, the rusted earth, untended, there where
moisture seeps, an eye gathering a tear, an eye
heaving, releasing its tremulous water-breath;
yet another site of extraction exists, offshore
drilling and onshore drilling, mobile and con-

ventional, sites piercing the coastal lobes;
ironically, oblivion exists, even if unre-
membered, oblivion exists, alongside
one’s resistance to oblivion, alongside
one’s instruction in the possibility of re-
covery, to hunt for an anomalous unde-
tectable submersible with an urgency
that might tutor our response to other

catastrophes; the offhand remark and
the offensive, the blow-off and the blow-
up, all that is off the charts, off the chain;
language donning the outfit of idiom;
alongside the offside, the timeout; along-
side the ointment, the unmendable; an
oilskin atop a less oily human skin, a skin
even so given to blotting; the integumentary

system exists, the largest organ, the system
of o’s, the o a pore where language seeps;
oh, oh; oh, oh; the o an ecstatic pore; the O-
ligocene epoch where first existed elephants
with trunks, elephants that continue, left-tusked
elephants and right-tusked elephants, one tusk
dominant, one dominating another, the owner-
ship of ivory, the two ivory teeth of elk, remnant

tusks, outlived; old fashioneds raised to celebrate
old fogeys; the devil at the racetrack, the devil
on the green, the bogey, one stroke over par,
named for the imaginary player—the bogeyman
or boogie man—befriending the bougie man
on the course where, of course, others play,
too; an oncogene and the patented OncoMouse,
the first animal in the Eden of the cure, unmap-

pable, a cancer-prone animal whose existence
was funded by a chemical company; the mini-
ature apple eyes of OncoMouse, vision’s sequins,
tiny red beads; the making and marketing of an
oil-metabolizing bacteria; the engineering of life
and the question of ownership; the accusation
of overreach; the timespan in which a thing
becomes obsolete; the translucence of onionskin,

a loud paper, sounding off in one’s hand, cut to
create the frosted windows of model trains, prized,
like a woman, for its low bulk, for the ease with
which it can be lifted, carried; the onionlessness
of onionskin, the animated cels; 100 million lakes
larger than one hectare exist, give or take, great
lakes and rift lakes, epic lakes and geologically
young, a lake called a sea, a sea depleted of seals,

a seal depleted of sea, a mere l, looming, a stitch





a note on these poems: These poems engage renown Danish poet Inger Christensen’s celebrated poetry book, alphabet (1981), translated into English the same year by Susanna Nied and published in translation twenty years later by New Directions. A book of intersecting forms, alphabet is an abecedarian poetry sequence (meaning its organization is alphabetical) that uses the Fibonacci sequence—one of the so-called languages of nature—to determine line count from section to section, which lends itself to a spiralling and expansive poetics. The intersection of linguistic and mathematical sense-making systems emphasizes the book’s questions about the limits of sense as Christensen engages the senselessness of the atrocities of war and planetary destruction. Christensen’s alphabet ends on section “n,” fittingly, perhaps, given that n is for noun and for number (in both English and Danish) and is used as a variable in equations and mathematical expressions. In adherence to the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on), her final section “n” should have consisted of 610 lines, but instead consists of 321 lines—a countdown. Three, two, one. I pick up at “[o],” an o-oriented poem series of 987 lines, with each poem and stanza in the series the length of a Fibonacci number, in addition.



Kristi Maxwell is the author of nine books of poems, including Wide Ass of Night (Saturnalia Books, 2025), Goners (Green Linden Press, 2023), winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize; Realm Sixty-four (Ahsahta Press, 2008), editor’s choice for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and finalist for the National Poetry Series; and Hush Sessions (Saturnalia, 2009), editor’s choice for the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She’s the Director of Creative Writing and Full Professor of English at the University of Louisville. Kristi holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Arizona.