Leveler Poetry Journal
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i think about all laws i can violate as i rummage through my refrigerator for food


sometimes i jump up and down on my bed and pretend i’m in outer space

bouncing in slow-motion across the surface of some planet that isn’t earth

it makes me feel like an astronaut killing aliens at hopscotch on venus or mars

and sometimes i get the feeling that every human sound comes from a flute

played by a constrictor snake in the garden of a small retirement community

across the street from a long pier built for elderly pedestrians in jupiter, florida




Adam Moorad

levelheaded: i think about all laws i can violate as i rummage through my refrigerator for food


Adam Moorad’s poem is weird. The title makes us wonder what the connection is between breaking the law and searching for some grub. Maybe he’s pointing out that poverty understandably begets higher crime rates. Maybe he just wants to make us laugh.


Whatever Moorad’s goals are, from the outset, his poem is one in which the speaker exists in two places at once. In reality, our speaker is hungry. In his imagination, he’s a hoodlum. When we continue onto the first line, again a physical action (“i jump up and down on my bed”) welcomes a thought (“and pretend i’m in outer space”). Here, as opposed to in the title, the connection between thought and action is more obvious.


This technique of knotting certain associations to one another and leaving others loosely bound seems central to the poem’s philosophy. That is, multiple things happen at the same time; some of them make sense in relation to one another, others don’t. Bouncing on the bed makes the speaker think of being an astronaut because astronauts appeared to bounce on the moon. How he arrives at “sometimes i get the feeling that every human sound comes from a flute” is a little more difficult to answer.


This surprising line ushers in another through Moorad’s clever enjambment. The flute is “played by a constrictor snake in the garden of a small retirement community.”  As in other parts of the poem (see: “killing aliens [/] at hopscotch”), the decision not to break the line after “snake in the garden” reinforces Moorad’s theme of a world of collisions. A mythological snake rubs elbows with an unsettlingly real retirement community.


In the final line as well, we’re at once here and there. “A long pier” floats ominously while “elderly pedestrians” trudge along as they would ordinarily. The poem’s final three words—“in jupiter, florida”—shoot us off into outer space just as they ground us in the land of Bermuda-shirted grandparents. Bearing the poem’s only comma, this closing phrase reinforces the author’s subtle assertion that some things are dependent on other things, even contained within them.



– The Editors