Poetry

for J.L. Thanks for your fan letter—I’ve built a shrine. I was up all night thinking of you up all night studying my use of slant and internal rhyme in A Shoemaker’s Dystopia. By line 317 the scheme I fear is obvious, so I was giddy as salmon at spawn that you found my little…

I’d Really Rather Be / In Authentic City for ukulele and voice Authentic Cowboys, authentic cats. Authentic clowns in paper hats. Authentic mountains, authentic lakes. Authentic clouds, authentic fakes. An authentic breeze luffs the sail, parts the hair on your authentic head. Your life you live authentically, Your death you die, authentic, dead. Call us…

Among the fossil fuels structure stands, clearly: crude, it burns; but refined— into frou- frouiest lace, or the baroquest and most willowy affectation in snowflakes —how ever so much more quickly the flames go. A standing house is a standing invitation to the match, with each gable, twilled turret, or fantastical arch floating on air,…

A bell is gonged, the body of a girl curled up inside it, a town grown wild, dogs sniffing skyward— gong, gong. They listen all night for the girl to fall, her stomach to growl, or is it a foot in a mindless gallop, snorts of delight as the gods take up the virgin-offer, or…

Another day of hair in my food. Another day of being cheated, Overlooked. Another day of nausea. I play Beethoven: Symphony 9. The violin simmers for an instant, And the cello is the instant, And the timpani, The timpani comes crashing. My stomach turns its peach pit to the moon! The sound says I am…

Becomes a layer, means a look A tilt my skull to better Seesaw from this to back To finishing for a kiss To lean on the fall of your hair My thumb and forefinger Like the rain Pooling gain by plurality.

Once a whiff, once a flint, the shifty skystuff blinds me on five sides. I take icefuls of noise and gas rounding out an inside. I prepare the upper reaches by kissing distance back into my skull like a transparent worm. Smoke keeps returning a little freckled, so I use it too. Throw it up…

When kiss spells contradiction it spills an ocean of open clothes. I gave me to one who hung hearts so high it was a mast in mute blue weather, the clang and strop of it, the undercover wet. Said are they sails your impenetrables that only winds can jibe them, the arc and the rip…

If you do it with a feather, it’s erotic. If you do it with the whole chicken, it’s perverted. —Contemporary bumper sticker Kenmore gloss-white washing machine, you idiot savant— dgalosh ganosh dgalosh ganosh dgalosh ganosh. To exorcize our dirt, we walk down stairs toward hell. That darkness, past the water heater, behind the furnace ….