![A poem called The Archer: The angel is strongly considering the abandonment of all human language. Sometimes, I screenshot
his stories: [ cursing the fat of a lawyer—you owe what you can’t afford to pay typed in caps over a cop
car in flames ] [ a quote from Revelations, a bodybuilder’s testimony ] [ anime girl with breasts
leaking milk-pearls; GIF of a spinning stone cherub ] Here: a suburban arsenal; here: YouTubes
of conspiracies proved. He pulls away the edge of his attic’s oriental carpet, practices throwing
a knife into the wooden floor again and again like punctuation. His fistful of memes like a callous.
Like a watch. When you’re not here, the angel says, you’re just missing. It seems an endless winter—
some poorly remembered translation of Euripides, a treatise on palimpsest. A sacred heart hums on
the angel’s neck. The more time I spend with the angel, the more weight I lose. A jellyfish swims only
by contraction and muscle, a body branching out from its center like spokes in a wheel.
How does it go—“When a good man is hurt, all who would be called good must suffer with him.”
The house arrest phone rings and goes unanswered, except by the angel’s curses—he is busy
with his drawer of supplement powders. A world that gets abandoned catches fire, says the angel, it comes
for what abandoned it.](https://i0.wp.com/coupletpoetry.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Klahr-The-Archer.png?resize=750%2C539&ssl=1)
From the author: It’s no secret that American law enforcement is sometimes enacted haphazardly, and that sometimes — more often than we’d like to admit — courts support the claims and actions of officers at the cost of the well-being of citizens. Particularly if the citizen in question is an addict and/or mentally ill or has had a prior conviction, even for something as victimless as trespassing. The system over-punishes like clockwork.
These poems are from a long series which recount and reflect a true story; at this time of writing these poems, my friend was on house arrest. Now, he is in jail.
Sophie Klahr is the author of Two Open Doors in a Field (University of Nebraska Press) and Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books), and co-author of There Is Only One Ghost in the World (Fiction Collective Two), which won the 2022 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. Her writing appears in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her online classes and literary editing services can be found at sophieklahr.com . She lives in Los Angeles.
