No Measure

In No Measure, two entangled scientists attempt to measure, record, and modify a desert on all scales, from a wide valley to a grain of sand. The speaker works with and for another researcher who watches over her from a “control room” as the speaker tends a desert remediation project. The desert setting is inspired by past and present industrial and ecological disasters as a result of climate change, technological production, and desertification.

Formally, the manuscript is comprised of ninety-two prose poems in three sections that create, through accumulation, a subtle narrative progression—a kind of love story. The scientific task of measurement and documentation on such a scale, and in such a changing landscape, is impossible, and this is layered with the desire to know and be with another through the same lens, with the same language. The repetition required of scientific processes is not unlike romantic obsession. Desire operates as a self-organized criticality: scientific erotics. Here, in a series of prose poems, performative acts of measurement create an installation the reader moves through, an atmosphere susceptible to weather.

In this work, the author explores how desire might be thought of as a self-organized criticality and the ways in which permutations of scale can be rendered immeasurable by a series of prose poems—creating a lapidary erotic.