by Mark Steven
The thing about realism
is industry really means
extraction but extraction
now means extinction
so industry is code
for annihilation as in
code red baia mare
chernobyl minamata
deepwater fukushima
whereas your exxons
are no longer mechanical
but austere and financial
radiant nanotech vampire
forsake southern france
every asset code black
just a fire in the distance
when together we discover
in petroleum superbloom
that the world is mutable
seas become mulberry fields.
Mark Steven is the author of Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (Johns Hopkins) and Splatter Capital (Repeater), and is now writing a book on the historical semantics of class war. He teaches at the University of Exeter.
