Photometric Observations of Exoplanet Transits

 

and flags and scraps of blue

above him make regatta of the day

 

—P.K. Page

The Glass Air: Poems Selected and New

 

I’ve read Canada

will be sending

POET to other worlds.

 

Though it’d be better to launch

a poet—to a planet

miming ours; such as TOI-

6716 b, discovered in ’26,

dubbing it Alicia instead—

as a troubadour

will often do,

 

the one who took a gavel to

your heart, leaving just the muse

to birth the verse; its woe,

its wonder, strophes of I would have

adored you more

if only—

 

surely, the real poet

in this charade

is of—unworthy

to be included in

the acronym; ghosted by

compression, how less & less

is more;

 

to languish in lower

case, the last one to be

picked when teams are chosen—

always the skins

and never the shirts, ribs that

brought the other

kids to snort—who never

offered yes when you

beseeched them for a dance—beneath

the gymnasium

lamps—which also may have chortled.

 

This has little to do with

planets over sixty-one

light years off.

Surely beyond the bounds

of a gasping

wordsmith—a childish astronaut:

 

one small step for poet;

one giant leap for poetkind,

 

ready to write of a

sea below the crag,

a stonescape gone vermillion,

this hollow, alien

sky bereft of clouds.

 

What wounds could

one convey—

to those who love alone?

Here and back on Earth:

froze in a candleless

corner, with Halfe & Brand &

Purdy, or maybe P.K. Page—

 

you’ve heard of her, right?

Don’t tell me that

her verses are

aboard the satellite, to somehow

serve as greeting to

a gangly, blue-

skinned marvel,

 

who will never have a

hint of what she shares,

doesn’t know of loss like

glass & air, has yet to hear

the sneers from a crater’s

pith,

 

or our very own,

when the rage

of a kindled rock

has missed its mark,

as though another’s

not on its way to

strike us down.

 

 

 

Andreas Gripp

April 30, 2026

Rewriting Androcles, or The Conversion of Theodore Nugent

 

Today

an earthquake will level

the suburbs of greater

LA. No one will be slain

since thoughts & prayers

will work for the very first time.

 

And today

the bosom of ICE

will thaw in piercing sleet,

the needle in 99

trillion sheaves at last

pinpointed. Mexicans will be

assembled to share a cake,

provided reparations

for 1848.

 

And today

no soldiers will be needed.

Either in plastic or in flesh.

Hasbro will give its profit

to grieving widows—

 

in every single country

on the planet. Boys will

play with dolls and

keep a home. Effigies

will be watered

from our wells.

 

And today

I’ll write a poem

that thunders the world.

 

And today

reserves will be no more.

No one will be ghettoed.

Settlers & Shoshoni

 

will fish from frothing

streams. Wash it down with

milk from the buffalo—

offered, never purloined.

Nothing will be taken

from this day on.

 

And today?

A lion’s sentry of the 

rose will be uprooted from its paw—

not by a children’s

fable—but a trophy

hunter vowing he’ll

go vegan from here on in.

 

And tomorrow?

America will finally choose

the woman of colour. Soaring,

magnificent colour.

It should have been

yesterday. It should have

always been yesterday.

 

 

 

—for Kamala

 

 

©2026 Andreas Gripp

Ashbury Park

 

The Holy Land is

nowhere near

Jerusalem. Dear Abrahamic

faiths—I am truly

sorry. Your shrouds once white

now claret

have stamped you null

& void. I get the jar of

sand you’ve cached is

thought to be a blessing.

That you’ve waded in the

Jordan, vowed to never

wash again. Like the very

first brush you felt

from a beloved crush. The ground

on which they tread—

 

roped off in your mind

with a silver plaque. No,

make that gold. There are seldom

second bananas

that are entombed in

sacred places. Every peel in compost

lives again, sharing

what it’s learned. Otherwise

what’s the point? No one’s

resurrected

so they fuck up yet again.

 

Take the daughter of

Jairus for instance.

There are some who swear they’ve

seen her south of Trenton. Gifting

a quilted blanket to a mongrel.

Receiving but a bark

as recompense.

 

You ask me why

the skin of trees is such.

It makes no canine yelp—

while we whittle our

initials in its flesh. Attesting

to puppy love—its sexless

innocence. I’ll never

love anyone else.

This is what is hallowed:

 

uplifting one in

burka along the beach.

Her innards sheared by

shrapnel. Your Magen David

a pendulum in a clock. Knowing

the time is short—there’s no one

who will flip the hour-

glass. Its grains from a strand in

Jersey.

 

They say Phoebe Cates

was there in ’82, a

9-year-old’s passing

fancy; that her footprint

on the shore

has yet to be

swept away. Such

is the persnickety

whim of tides. Deciding

what is chosen, who is pulled

into the gulf, spat back like

a half-digested Jonah—

cheeky in his quarrel

with the Lord. All of it

eclipsing

godly borders.

 

I’ve enshrined

a shard of driftwood

in an urn. Spewed from

the Hudson River. You

gasped amid a gander

it’s a bone!

 

Child, what’s

the difference? I’ll hold it

to my finger

in the morning. Set them both

alight. You’ll choose

what speaks of sun

with squinting eyes.

Tell me

which-is-which

amid the ash. Blow your

breath upon them, watch

them rise together

in Hoboken, like the wish

of milky seedlings

spurned as weed.

 

 

Andreas Gripp

April 20, 2026

The Fall of Boreas: god of the cold north wind and bringer of winter

 

Iceland is no longer

mosquito-free. When it comes

to global problems, this is hardly

breaking news.

Maybe that’s why I found it

while perusing phys.org—

though how it pertains

to physics I do not know.

 

What I do know is

no one loves mosquitos but the

frogs. And spiders. And maybe the

odd lizard here & there.

I can’t imagine Iceland having

frogs—their croaks

from some volcano

keeping me up at night. But of course,

arachnids must be everywhere—

like the rat & kitchen roach.

 

How else do you know your

novel’s gone unread? By what

other means can you tell

that no one’s here—than a cobwebbed

couch and shelf? That your poems

have gone untouched in 30 years?

 

Or maybe it has little

to do with dusting or

a lack thereof. Perhaps the spiders

are not as vapid as we thought—

calling dibs on the Dostoevsky

you’ll fail to get to

one of these days.

 

Or perchance they’re sophistiqué—

uncorking Chablis on the sofa

while they listen to Sigur Rós.

Maybe we need them now

more than ever—

while we trudge through Reykjavík,

eager to jaunt to the hot springs

of which the locals boast;

cringing from all the whirring

in our ears—this vampiric

frequency,

 

knowing that any second they

will prick us for our blood in

tender places,

lapping it up like wine;

these interlopers

from the swamp,

who once feasted on

Tyrannosaurus;

Pinocchio-nosed

potentates of the air;

 

that now we’ve lost

our only rationale—for settling

so far up north—

stung to the very marrow,

by the god of gale & snow;

his deal with a droning devil

he made an oath

to shield us from

 

 

 

Andreas Gripp

April 19, 2026

dear god: no more boring poems about the rocks

Well, maybe just one more.

But only if the rocks

were once a boulder and the boulder

a bit of mountain. Not Everest or

Olympus Mons, but the smallest one

on Earth—mistaken as a hill

by both the yodeller and the mole.

 

The only thing worse

than being found naked? Caught

in lederhosen. I don’t mean

dead—but very much alive and

trudging down the slope so

scarlet-faced—for which you’ll no doubt

blame the sun

and SPF-point-five.

 

When does a stone become too large

to be a stone? Why must a

skipping one be as flat as

Amsterdam—smooth like the head

of a monk, chanting

Namo Tassa by the candles—

his robe the hue of mud. He sits there

in a stupor: without it there’s no lotus.

Thank you, Lama Obvious.

If all is emptiness—then fuck off with

your begging bowl.

 

The bread here’s hard as granite—

day-old, my ass. Try baked in the

Pleistocene. Its best before tag

being switched by a Cro-Magnon.

 

You told me once

that Wilma had sex with

The Great Gazoo. That’s why Pebbles’

crown of green was dyed

bright red. Why she spouted

such sweet gibberish.

 

Did you know there’s

actually a dictionary for such?

If they can do it for Klingonese,

why not the babble of babes?

Hear how they utter rock—

that heartless, jagged creature

they say can never feel a thing—

 

even when we hurl one back

to sea, as if it was somehow

better off there in the land

from whence it came.

 

 

 

Andreas Gripp

April 17, 2026

Confession, or Requiem for Freya

 

There’s a certain way to

voice it that removes all trace

of doubt:

 

I love you denotes that

you’ve been chosen; out of everyone

who’s birthed; that I know of

seasoned ardour & its

heave; two clans who tug in

kilts below the boughs,

your name in orange plaid—

the hue of a lifting sun.

Your lambency aloft

beyond the rain.

 

I  love you is stuck in self-

importance. A smug,

Earth-centric cosmos.

How honoured

you should be of

my devotion—as though each rose

a laurel—from the gardener

not the garth. Every drop of aqua

spawned of jug and not of cloud.

 

I love you is a nimbus’

restitution, dropping its

gifted plume—

as a pilot does a bomb—

in & up then down.

 

And yes, passion’s often such:

 

appraise the way a woman

laments the name of

her fallen son; the father who in

weeks will wet her coffin; and

the misty-eyes of Aspens,

mourning the passing wood

as much as we.

 

 

 

Andreas Gripp

April 15, 2026