Poetry: “Inversion in Green” by Benjamin Renné
It’s not immediately clear what the inversion in Benjamin Renne’s poem is referring to, but as the poem sparks from line to line with its remarkable energy, it becomes impossible to ignore the clear animosity Renne’s speaker seems to hold towards what feels like a murky blurring of character and plant life.
Inversion in Green
So you thought
you could become
suddenly
a june berry tree,
unkempt & multifoliate
like the one outside
our bedroom window
which you used as cover
in the heavy summer
to stand naked
& bask
in uneasy sunlight,
ready to photosynthesize
your arms uplifted
like careful branches
your face turned
eastward to chart
the course of the sun
as it curled up
over the condos
& the shopping center
& the flaky rim
of highways
which have replaced
our bones with traffic
& our skin with suburbs.
So you thought
you could dissolve
into something
unrecognizable, wind
without resistance,
rain without ruin,
light without anguish
& the swift overflow
of last night’s downpour
washing through your
well-watered roots
to over-saturate yourself
with a calculus
of inversions, becoming
first one dream
& then, another.
Benjamin Renné
Benjamin Renné (he/him) teaches writing and literature in Northern Virginia. His poems seek the soft places in between reality, where you feel at once both inside and outside, perched on a threshold -- the breath before rain, or the cut of purple sky at dusk. His manuscript, "Fragments of a Solar Phenomenon", was a finalist for the 2023 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University and his poetry has appeared in Juked, Prelude, Cleaver, Ghost Proposal, and more.
