6.14 / November 2011
Four Poems
Almighty
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His twitch. His gaptooth. His meathook hands. His whiskey.
His cocaine. His lie. His momma. His lie. His girl. His lie. His lie.
His mask. His blame. His finger-point. His backstab. His loyal. His game.
His drunk. His spill. His fool. His freeload. His pass-out.
His breath. His dirt socks. His [...]
The People Called Endless
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(9) The heart interviews and other views, from The People Called Endless
I more like it’s my heart, her heart, mine, mine, my heart hers, his heart, my heart, hers hers hers, her heart, mine mine mine my heart, theirs, ours, hers, mine, mine, my heart for all [...]
Lowndes County, GA
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A fire, they say, down in the paper mills. In the field, a cradle of spined nettles. A forest of ferns unfolding like mittens in the push of late evening. Four tight-chinned women ferry supplies toward the town, floral dresses catching noiselessly on ribbed thistle. In the daily [...]
Pictures From the Coast of France
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Three days after I found a high-quality photograph of my father’s penis, captured on at least ISO 400-speed film stock, laid out over four-color spreads on pages 56 & 57 of the Swiss export, Der Körper, I broke up with my girlfriend and made plans to leave [...]
Fortune’s Conjecture
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x#=??(x)pi
i=1
order of operations
On the day of our wedding she couldn’t afford a dress. I borrowed a suit from a friend and drove to city hall. When she took my last name, it meant forever. It was addition: the happiest kind of math.
We moved six [...]
Crumbles and Gumbles
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With his left eye clamped on the brass monocular and his right eye splashed with sea salts, Christopher Columbus felt the sting of a long, drawn-out mistake. Seven months had it been already? Eight? He had etched a tally on the wooden plank above his bedpost with [...]
Five Poems
A Worm
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A weird worm crawled into my heart
And It said, “All of your thoughts are
Not true thoughts”. The tongue tastes the air
and the air tastes like sawdust. Grey crowds of
people crumble on the sidewalks.
Now the sky is purple, and a misplaced thread of
Woven blue. Somewhere in the [...]
Silver Dagger
The house had three stories.
THE FIRST
Before the war he was not a father, but when he returned he was twice over – a child in Alabama, a daughter that his wife had named Savanna after her mother, and in Germany a son that he would never meet, the boy [...]
Two Poems
THE OTHER WOMAN’S VOICE
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A moment like that—you hearing me—
would have an actual, defined sound—
no right hand noiseless pulling, typing
hurriedly, or muffling over the phone.
For once, there’d be no time difference,
no limp excuses of long hours at work,
that woman hovering around you, lack
of privacy, or pub crawling with [...]
Light at New Latitude
She was on her back under a stiff sheet in a bed with metal side rails too low for her to pull herself up by. With her shoulder weight on one elbow and slowly onto both she was able to boost herself upright with only slender flashes deep in her [...]
Four Poems
Pennies
Hong Kong, 2011
Seven million
wriggling tiny agonies
behind whose smiles
lies the trembling
of the lost.
I, as all the others,
clutch my past;
am like the outside:
too big,
too everywhere.
Seven million nobodies
for a nothing in this world,
we cry, cry, cry
for survival
from obscurity.
Nauseated looks
on bloated faces:
Seven million
dead skins that form
a sloughing flatness:
Regimented plant life,
hanging and swelling
with the
taste of [...]
Man Who Lost His Wife at the Knife-Throwing Show
At a dinner table set for two
I feel like the only person at
a rest stop off the interstate
walking under orange
streetlights in the parking lot.
A Map/A Method
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THE WOODS
Me and her, we go into the woods behind the park on the north side of town, past the crumbling statue of the district’s founder. Me and her, we go into the woods behind the park, past the people walking their big dogs. Everyone [...]
Songs from the River
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I was the first to notice the water pooling in front of the staircase. I looked up, but didn’t see any watermarks, no sign of a drip from the high ceiling. I soaked up the water with towels and buffed the floor with lemon-scented wood polish. But [...]
The Fiber Optic Heart
My daughter Ramona’s coach puts her in backstroke at meets, since she’s still afraid to dive, but freestyle is her favorite. When she does the 100-yard free, at practice, her face is in the water too much for me. Like now, as she’s finishing up and the other kids are [...]
Lapping it Up
Listen to me.
Chances are I don’t like you. Yah, you. The fucking reader. I’d like to scream in your face. I’d like to see you cry. I’d like to fucking kill you. Maybe now you’ll put this down because you don’t care what is going on [...]
Pretty Girl Says:
Pretty Girl Says:
I’m not afraid of anything.
Once, I walked the yellow brick
road.
I don’t like yellow. I made it
pink.
Don’t ask me about eating, you won’t like my answer.
I think food is god’s way
of turning everything into
his own.
We’re all food, all edible.
There’s a cycle, see? You eat,
an organism eats you,
– unstable. [...]
Flesh is Flesh
Greg’s got a mantra in his head that just keeps going: I am entering the world like a big, naked baby. He turns the deadbolt and opens the door. Like a big, naked baby. The grass outside is starting to grow back from being dead over the winter. Most of [...]
Three Poems
Birth as Agathism
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First, we’ll say: O Mama-cow, milk-giver, how your legs
scissor apart. How your hooves twitch in dirt.
We’ll say: We will drink what you give us.
We’ll say: How we could eat.
Then we’ll say: A nose! A muzzle!
We’ll say: Of all your yellow juices, none of them
like nightmares.
(We’ll [...]
Five Poems
They Must Bake an Awful Lot of Cakes
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Try venturing out beyond the searchlights and see where it gets you. I remember when it was Gerry out venturing beyond the searchlights to see where it’d get him. Remember we didn’t hear from him for two weeks [...]
Presidents
The Jeffersons
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On the living room set of The Jeffersons there is a man and a woman and another man who becomes a man named Lionel when he stands or sits in front of the camera. Lionel mostly stands, though, because for some reason he can’t just sit [...]
Two Poems
this morning I pulled a picture of my mother from my mouth
You confound me every day. You are not who you look like. You are not you. Look at your tiny eyes and lips. Look at those cheeks, apple-like. You hate apples. You eat them—entirely, skin [...]
Two Poems
BULLY PUPPET
Sometimes it was like this:
first a Hummer,
then two black town cars
and then three SUVs.
In the last, I saw
a wooden puppet waving
through a half-open window
so I waved too, shy
but friendly in that tentative
Midwestern kind of way,
happy to be noticed for once,
or so I thought. But then
tires screeched
to a halt [...]