Bruce Cohen

Concussion Test

1. Do you feel heartsick for aboriginal (original) people wearing baseball caps?
2. Do you feel desensitized toward unoriginal people wearing baseball caps?
3. Have you ever witnessed a jet crash before it happened?
4. How would you define?
5. Does one atom of carbon monoxide understand how it contributes to the suicide?
6. Have you ever considered even metaphorically harming yourself?

I’m the one asking the questions here.  But no, I wouldn’t say everyone has.

7. Did you ever wish you had a different father? Or would you wish he came back to life so you could unsay a few hurtful things or say the unsaid?
8. Is narcolepsy the opposite of insomnia or is insomnia the opposite of indifference?
9. Have you considered much how every third person or so
10. Is sort of a flying monkey from the Wizard of Oz?

Explain the following with a mathematical formula: birds see ultraviolent light,
Detect many more mutated colors than we.
Any bird isolated with any music will learn to mimic that song.

11. Do you ever make up your own lyrics to rock songs because you can’t understand

The palabras? (There is a scientific explanation).

12. Is your common state of being: puzzlement?

Is God a prime number or has he been rehearsing his one speech for eternity?
True or Not So Much: shadow boxing is another way of making art.
Let’s say hypothetically you were very hungry
& the microwave was busted.

13. How many moons before you’d gnaw the frozen pre-cooked chicken thigh?
14. (or two # 15’s) The order is disorder (Stevens) disorder is a kind of order.
15. Do you value privacy above all else or are you comfortable taking your shirt off at the beach?

A fetal position on a lifeless couch (19). Whose responsibility is it?

16. Is that how you feel sometimes, bogged down with modernistic ideas?

Channel flipping: mermaids still exist or did actually.
Naked & Afraid.  Aliens living among us.  A blueprint.  Would you like a blueprint?

Author: Bruce Cohen

Bruce Cohen has published five volumes of poetry: Disloyal Yo-Yo (Dream Horse Press), which was awarded the 2007 Orphic Poetry Prize, Swerve (Black Lawrence Press), Placebo Junkies Conspiring with the Half-Asleep (Black Lawrence Press), No Soap, Radio (Black Lawrence Press) and Imminent Disappearances, Impossible Numbers & Panoramic X-Rays, was awarded the Green Rose Prize from (New Issues Press). A new book, Botrytis, will appear in 2026 from (Cornerstone Press). His poems and essays have appeared in literary journals such AGNI, The Alaska Quarterly, The Columbia Journal, The Gettysburg Review, The Harvard Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry, and The Southern Review as well as being featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily & included the Pushcart Prize. He recently was awarded the James Olney Award from the Southern Review. 

Plume: Issue #83 June 2018