soaked in the static chatter
you’re the ellipse
of your mother’s life.
segue from her mother
into you, mother
seems an endlessly repeating
field of vision.
snow on a television
what can you pull
from those drifts of emptiness
unfolded fingers let loosen stoplights on a slow blink
a necklace of yellow teeth pulled from a meth head’s mouth
i was desparate for a dollar but forgot to check her bra
i folded fingers back up again, and lifted a sidewalk tile
shined a cellphone flashlight on worms and beetles.
(had to click the buttons to keep the screen lit,
heard a voice and said nothing until they hung up)
you can check the accuracy of a number by the phonebooks i have stacked in the bathroom,
the letter z is a hidden compartment hollowed out and glued solid.
a wedding ring shook around inside, bent at impossible angles
i switched it out with some wire and unlucky broken mirror parts
flushed the toilet, pulled up my pants, accidentally locked the door behind me
i held the ring in my sweaty hands and closed my eyes and let it guide me
walked in random directions until i found her, choking on peanut butter
McDonalds wasnt open yet, so she was doing what she needed to do -
i dropped the ring into her hand and said it was a great painkiller
(she said she didn’t take pills but i didn’t believe her
i could tell because i saw ghosts between the trees, spying on her flesh
since the dead want to take her over an experience weak life again)
somebodys alarm clock went crazy with loud talk radio
i stepped aside to let the sounds pass by
but a bus went by instead, the one i wanted to catch,
and i wondered if she would mind if i stayed there for an hour
(my mumbling facade, my blow dryed hair
i was getting wet again with sweat, giggling to myself once in while
over an old joke that doesn’t make much sense nowadays)
chris bullock
the family tree
from a water rotten acorn
it sows the blind ambiguity
of a man growing
out of something not completely whole
out of ground salted
with visions of god
with the goatish television
that tree be tangled
the branches hang
in empty space
isolated, apart, and forgetting…
grudgingly dropping their rotten fruit
at winter wind’s undeniable claim
the identical seed
a blackened forest of identical trees
Stacks of mail next to tv dinners
choirs counting down faded melodies
on public access channels -
I thought I had figured out an exit from the living room
but found my hand under the armchair again,
collecting sticky pennies and drinking my own drool.
At least the ceiling provides complete shade
from the low slow sun,
weighed down by
the old machinery
of its own orbit.
Oh well, I saw an old bird chewing on
a roadkill of macabre colors.
Oh well, I saw a little girl
sewing something on the swingset,
while the barbeque flirtations went inside
for uncomfortable sex in the pale bedrooms -
mattresses inflated on the floor.
A book about dinosaurs lay open
and the wind turned the pages.
When the wind was done reading
it just blew the book into the wall.
Footprints on homework:
that’s how I felt at that age,
or was I ever that age?
I don’t remember it.
The sun turned around and mooned us,
that’s how I knew it was night.
We covered our eyes and hoped
a vision of the holy ghost in our head
would light up the hallway with its gospel,
but I just saw my own fingers over my eyes
but I just saw the microscopic geometry
of my own breath, spreading out, evaporating.
She buried her flowers in the backyard,
made a grave and everything -
named each one twice, different names,
in case the first name was taken already.
The pots became storage for bubble gum wrappers
always useful for licking the old taste off later,
The evening is a parade of grownups
they hope they’ll enjoy the day before it ends -
the fragrance of fingerprints rising from
the kitchen counter where several small bugs
were born.
chris bullock
lorca, how many times
do you revise your stuff
ginsberg, how many times
do you revise your stuff
poets, how many
paz, you prolly revise
your poems too. did
rimbaud, rock and roll
i think, and gay
you too lorca, got blasted
how would you poets write
beneath cellular bombardment?! New Radio
glom’d it did
oh fair-child, i tied these
tiny muscled wraiths
in rapid string of verbiage
this is still crystal?
i whimper daylight facet
in a moon-shin’d
grt!!! prolix mad gib
orphic frustration idon’teven
know what that means
so, it’s following, soapily
it shapes itself
with the round ow or om
orifice frustration is
nearly the same!?
!
possibly
when I was bright and eaten by the poppies
When I was bright and eaten by
the poppies’-stain and given
to the brighter arts,
I fancied for myself a hallowed myth
that ate away at childhood’s sad lament
and ‘memebered at that there within was hidden
in the answer’s rudish hollow.
Still, back behind the water’s pooling,
I ate away at my content,
misplaced and dying to erase away
the hours lived at tide’s-wash, turning,
at my mother’s churlish breasts.
And as I rooted deep
in mediation,
shadows grew and shadow’d figures on the wall
became my distant, grudging host and legion,
eating at my hearts desire.
The curse that ate the later coming body
came the same as that which ate at
Lazarus’ flesh, and at the tomb’s gate swallowed up
the child that rested in the mother’s softening womb.
When these eyes bright-flashed at omens,
simple and unbending, telling of a passing life,
the child in ceremony sang
and bowed before the movement of the tepid knife.
Up in the hills
(precluding mounds of death and mountain),
parching for the swallowed crest,
the whorish sang of sex and Babylon,
and songs that sang of tasted lust passed by, in pace,
and carried on, so that the pious
gave me meaning,
there I lingered on.
And as the sage’s rustlling tampered,
beaten by the snow’s-bed falling,
the window filled became the saddened calling
for the green to go about its dying
and to fall about our paths.
robert cole-sackett