Subbing

By Michael Bickford

They drift through classrooms,
            pass us in the hall,
            on the road to their there,
                      our here now,
gather what they will
            from us, the elders.
                                   We gasp in wonder
                        at their innocent ignorant beauty
                        their nourishment from nothing, their streaming
                        surge, raw-ripe rumpled shine, like huge wrinkled
                        hatchlings     glorious     glowing     unknowing
            every sighting a new species ID
                        (Adolescencia prepubencia)
                                    middle school gen zero, twelve and thirteen— 
                                                  that age for me a series of neurons
                                                    connecting revenant emo-djinns
                                                                  I no longer feel. 

I saw a boomer on a screen playing
a boomer in a scene where all agreed
things were better
when and there, then and how.
They weren’t. 
​
1. Where were you then? Where will you have been?
When will you be where you are?
Answer in complete sentences.
Show your work.

Some in their journey join us on the verge
            to ease the pain of smart eruptions
                        with prodigious plants and entheogenic fungi,
                                    grown and dried,
                                    burned and breathed,
                                    sold and swallowed
                                    long before they knew
                                                there was a truth to seek.
 
We mentors lie and say we never cared
            because it hurts too much
            to be ignored when we do.
We watch them as they fall off hidden cliffs
            we lied and said we never saw
            because we didn’t want to be a cause
                        of death predicted yet not prevented.
 
             2. What can be done
                         when you bare yourself
                              and can’t bear up?
            Who or who else?
                        Complete show in your answer work sentences.

Fear is
substrate of
action/inaction
enaction/reaction
substitution       substitute      submission        submit
sublime        subliminal        sublimate
stand-in stand-up
stands and delivers
stands in the river
watches it rise.
Submerged.
Naked.     Drowning.
​Poser                      Imposer                                                       Imposter                      Fake

             3. In what way is this
                       a syndrome?
                          Answer sentences in complete
                       work your show.
 
           4. Who am I when I am
                      someone else? 

(Who are you today?)
Who was I when I was myself?
Who will I be before I am no one?
In show   sentences answer   complete your work. 

---

Zero

By Michael Bickford

Time lives
as digits on a number line.
Now is zero    and now    and now   and now
the no in now a shadow looming long
zero the hinge the holder of place
where all moments exist
before they are gone.
 
Melody
sequences of numbers
frequencies of waves
energy moving
through fluid in space
   zero in music lives only as silence.
 
Fibonacci
used the term zephyrum
the empty west wind 
in tennis we say love  
l’oeuf     the egg
pregnant
with the cipher of the future
yet nil   the empty set   signifying zilch.
 
Life
the tick of all the hearts that beat
at once
emerges in the moment now
fleeting harmony in forms
the endless helix-song
without attack   cadence   motive or rest.
 
We are
nothing that has ever been
becoming
what could never be
 
all
that has ever been
becoming
all that ever will
 
alive
in an infinite
zero.

---

​Michael Bickford was born in Los Angeles, and escaped north. After an extensive street education, he graduated with a BA and a teaching credential from San Francisco State University. He moved to California’s Redwood Coast from San Francisco in 1990 with his wife and their two children. Mr. Bickford taught middle school for 30 years in San Francisco and Eureka, CA.
 
Michael is a fellow of the Redwood Writing Project of Cal Poly Humboldt and a founding member of Lost Coast Writers Community, Inc. He writes poetry and fiction in Arcata, California. His work has appeared in Abandoned Mine, Fauxmoir, Seven Gill Shark Review, Ink People Center for the Arts, The North Coast Journal, and Behind the Mask: 40 Humboldt Poets on the Pandemic. His dual-language chapbook, Mrs. Silva Walks to the Azores, A Story in Ten Cantos (with Portuguese translation by 2023 National Book Award winner Bruna Dantas Lobato) is forthcoming this summer from Finishing Line Press.