AS SEEN IN:
ABSTRACT BIRTH
{Originally published in The Literary Review}
If you were you, you would be yourself by now,
myopic & blonde, patriotic as ozone yet pitiful
as a broken ox—your mustard-yellow yoke
melting in the sun.
If you were you, you would be
the iconography of a good marriage, a Brooklyn-
bound train, the refrigerated charm of an airplane
over Appalachia.
You would be a violent thing to love, your tongue
poor in vowel & grooved with dust.
You would be play money—
tender if legal—a kind of pyramid scheme sunk
on the wrong side of profit,
your capital humming on the other side of childhood
like a dutiful daughter.
If you were you, you would be a bad
Polaroid of a bad birthday, a toothy postcard
printed to commemorate some intestinal moment,
your smile sinister as a ghost ship grounded in fog.
You would be the ghost of that ghost ship—
the shipwreck—salt & wrack under the ferocious
hands of the sea, your eyes scraps of mint fabric
bobbing on the reflection of your face.
You would be
a bird over the chalkboard of the west, lonely as rope
among the cheap advertising of clouds, no?
Wouldn’t you, full of the anchovy
light of late summer & calm as dishwater, calm at last,
feel every qualm a feathered thing gone extinct & fast?
ANTHROPOCENE COOL
{Originally published in West Branch}
Tell me what
you deserve
& I’ll give it
at my expense.
Give me
enough string
& I’ll twine
your desire
to its fruit.
So long
as its fruit
is me. Other-
wise, go indigent
& handsome
on your road.
Go crimson
& unpronounceable,
your cosmology
porcine & gasket,
your grief an
incandescent cancer
that conjugates
all joy into loss—
your congregation
curtained as a circus
must be to protect
its profits from
payless eyes.
Likewise,
we’re curtailed
by pretension,
unappreciated
by everything
from maharaja
to messiah,
mulberry bush
to song about it.
We wander grass-
fed boutiques
of jussive animals
like Victorian
pensioners, twirling
umbrellas & in lace,
calling the lion
old-fashioned,
long-in-tooth.
Nostalgia confers
narcissism like
a tree. So we sit
in the audience
of that circus,
suspect & brigand,
like a magazine
so estranged from
its congressman
that it falls
out of circulation.
So we smile
& show the barcode
of our teeth.
So we run. So
we run. Blown
out like a bride
on a beach,
all bluster &
white, the sky
armored
with birds & secular
as a tomb
given to tourism.
THE BELL SYSTEM
{Winner of the Poetry Society of America's 2016 George Bogin Memorial Award}
Goodnight—Mary, Jane, Pat.
Sleep tight, you sweet operators
of America, your voices strung
like laundry across this nation
drowsy with a full century's-worth
of light. There's nothing you
can't tell me that I haven't already
heard gift-wrapped in your General
American grace, but still I wonder
in what chamber of a horse's ant-
eaten skull I'll recover my youth.
Our human garden grows rich
in these green suburbs and what I feel
is not so much loss as a lessening,
as if the self was nothing more
than a late-model sedan crossing
the city limit in search of a better
resale value. It's funny, this franchise
of molecules that fizzes up in each
of us, like motels viral along the interstate:
some full while others flicker and die.
When will the stars rain down
like cheap plaster? When will language
be little more than a dandruff shaken
from our heads? Ladies, you tell me
the number I've been calling has been
disconnected, but where did the person
it belonged to go? Alone on the line
I find only a prairie alive with funneled
wind, a nation heavy with wheat and light,
its chorus of dim voices locked in a kind
of pharmaceutical sleep. I find a system
unchanged, charged with electrical pulses
that send the receiver scurrying in their cradle,
the longhand breath of ghosts rising
through switchboards to ask Who's there?
Well, tell me. Who is there? Who goes?
Ladies, please wake up. I want to try again.
THE HALLOWEEN HABIT
{Originally published in Gulf Coast}
We were poor in heat, poor in
plumbing.
Poverty then a plum
uneaten in the icebox.
The bank account a lunchbox
that ate itself.
On Halloween I hid
in the swimming pool.
Our house was forever
latched in dusk.
There were snakes
in the walls.
They slithered a bitter
alphabet as we slept.
One day my father cut
a door in the wall.
A samba of sparks & venom
showered out.
The ceiling fell like snow
and the next morning
I handled spent cigarettes
with a curator’s careful lips.
MUTINY BY FISH
{Originally published in Denver Quarterly}
Argument grew
like algae after,
but only the emergency
exit would do
so we took our faith
in geography
and put it to the test.
Then down to the soap-
bones we decided to break
even and took half of nothing
nowhere the other was going.
In travel I saw buffalo, dorado,
cuckoo, & macaw.
I saw
murder & the missive peace
of small-town summer.
Certain states had
a hydroelectric hum
to them, as if their
fossils were angry
at being woken up.
A junebug
of smoke
lullabied Kansas.
A wedding party
of rocks wept
in the Dakotas.
Everywhere I found
the long-lost bottom
of the sea.
Everywhere I found
gas stations & beauty parlors.
Everywhere I found
someone & something
to sell.
I broke up
over Nebraska
and showered down.
WRISTWATCH TO DISAPPOINT
{Originally published in Anti-}
1.
Locusts
eat Ohio alive.
June is the first
month in bank
robbery season.
Silky
tornado
nestles in
the trash.
Angles of
neckties act
as compasses
for flight.
2.
You will
disappear.
3.
You will feel
the need
to disappear.
4.
In an abandoned lot,
a slow conglomerate
of green tongues
devour a dead bird.
5.
Fill in the blank:
“This new-century
sky is ______.”
a) Noctilucent.
b) Nacreous.
c) Lenticular.
d) Unidentifiable
as fluoride.
e) All of the above.
6.
The sky is
a cinderblock
smashed by
hydrogen
and mothlight.
7.
Wreckage
is a kind
of question.
It asks you
to reconsider
your inventory.
8.
Broken jackknife?
Decoder ring?
Come back.
Milk-white set
of marbles?
Come back.
Boiled shark
jaws? Sloop load
of clams? Antique
copper broach?
Please, come back.
This wristwatch
won’t tick,
won’t heirloom,
but disappoint.
9.
In its abandoned lot,
the dead bird is gone.
Green tongues twist
slowly with its memory—
memory
a thing
that devours
things
that will devour
things.
10.
Spare licks
of lightning
pepper the pan-
handle.
Trees teethe
in a locust
zone.
11.
Come back.
12.
Construction
workers wear
Federal orange
vests, smoke
cigarettes in
the noon haze
as they undo
the street’s
ceiling. Cars
run on boiled
bones. Smog
rolls in like
a prehistoric ghost
to slumber. At
night our cities
are swallowed
in swamps
of orange light.
Ghosts, federal
as bone, boil
around us.
13.
According to
local sources,
a well-kept lawn
is the simplest
indicator of
economic stability.
Also,
burglars operate
under the night’s
braille blanket.
Conversation is
a politic of trivia.
A newspaper is
a politic of a tree.
14.
In the beginning
atoms collided
like German
consonants.
Everything
else stewed in
the oilfields of
Los Angeles.
15.
And ghosts,
federal as bone,
boil still around us.
16.
Already heat has broke
loose of its zoo.
Children
chew tar, kick cans, call
strangers collect.
They drown
the radioman in his radio.
17.
Come back. Come back,
children. Come back
and see the Midwest’s
checkerboard from
30,000 feet, the smoke
of industry leering like
syrup over the river,
alming the sky of life.
THE MOSQUITO MONOCRACY
{Originally published in Boston Review}
1.
Josephine, I’ve junked
a jazz band, some squall
grullo by the cobweb’s logic.
All skulls and bouillabaisse
but we’ll see come Zulu
time if it’s of goodwill
or gall the Zoroaster sings.
All this in the hallway where
July stalls jetlagged,
in the hallway where
the lemonade light lingers.
2.
Every day was Halloween
in the Middle Ages:
the cravats of betrayed
consiglieri crispened under
Carpathian sun. So long,
Main Street. So sorry.
I’ve rung you jealous
to say slender things
from this fickle well.
I think it best we go
to bed now.
3.
Roll them bones
at benthic measure.
The bankers of sleep
bicker in the break
room. I find telephones
humming in their buoyant
cases everywhere along
the river, all unanswered;
all when answered yield
the voice that calls
you to waking.
4.
From the calcite
mountains of our mouths.
5.
My time in Malaria,
among the mystic
zombies who dragged
themselves like trash
through the tropics
chanting no time
like this time like
this time to waste,
was accurately reported
as an adventure in
rudimentary calisthenics.
They haunt me like
hemoglobin. From behind
bus terminals they ply
us in paper suits, watch
us like iceboxes.
6.
Upon alkaline lakes we
skate on alkaline skates.
In ermine the eel eats
the eggs of each oak tree.
I eye the exit out into
the taxi-infested night.