Joke in a Bank
When you try to make a joke in a bank it falls flat there’s an armed guard standing there wearing sunglasses indoors motionless but no one laughs in fact my intentions are misunderstood no, no, I am just going to walk out the door and come back in to turn my coins into paper money fifty-three dollars in the sunshine I’m on my way with my jacket in my backpack and the steel grates over the pubs early afternoon my step as high as the starlings bickering in the sky the birdsong of the city and the paper lifting off the sidewalks goodbye, I wish the world were different
North Country Concrete
Said, find us, alignment could well mean please, find us. Control is not for me. To learn from all kinds of music! What harm could be had. The multitudes of secret handshakes. High hopes kill every time. Dangerous accumulations and mistakes in the weather. I never saw such a broken in window but last night it was a yellow car. The mechanic gets laid why he smells like that. We have no control. The screens bad enough for Japanese ladybugs. This Land. Where else is the weather such a conversation where else does the weather sound so much like this. Prophets of a square of a land this big. They say, big sky go south and west, they say water, pick your best hand, drive that way they say, moose and you would be so lucky they say corn maze, you say how high they say Jell-O you say pretty how beautiful I could eat this every day. The apartment, the apartment. The floor is failing by the slippers’ count. O kind fixtures O sweet light. To have guests to put it out. Weather make me talk less weather say the lovelies. In the dining room it was cloudy with a dew point of blue flowers. Said Come Over to the arm chair, won’t you. What else could I have said to the shower. The airplanes audible. What kind of forecast. What a picture this is becoming. Shapes are difficult to speak of. Shiny protective material. Tiny little mishaps. Quiet! Quiet riot in the city.
Poem that Addresses the Possibility that You’re Reading this Poem in a Literary Journal Good for you. I read some journals too, but the odds of actually finding this poem can’t be good. Thanks for making the effort. I hope you feel like it was worth it. |
Barn
She hit a boy with a shovel in a barn. She saw nothing but the math of it. Ascent, arc, intersect. And the shapes: triangle on oval in a sun-drowned pentagon. A thing in motion tends to stay. She hit a boy. She grew up to list numbers in files in pale rooms full of dustless air. She wears nice clothes. She wears nice clothes.
See June Run
June is a better girl than July. June has chipmunks whereas July has black squirrels in a graveyard. June has centrifugal force, careening outward into the space of all spaces, a room full of delicate chaos. The briefest reprieve from order, that June. The smallest oxymoron. July is a nutshell and cloying and wants to stay close to home. July is also a whirlpool. But she doesn’t know it. July is dangerously close to spinning out in a race from the center. But she doesn’t know it. No one told her that physics doesn’t really exist, that force is just a name we give to our own laziness, that circles are just confused straight lines. No one told July about the blackness beating in her heart. No one told July that her body is not in a box, it is the box. While June sits over the grave, happy little campsite, July suffocates on the particulates.
Cherry Tale Some boys were playing baseball in the yard. A woman went out into the yard and was reaching for cherries. The batter threw back the bat and accidentally hit her on the head. She dropped dead at the same moment the child was born. On the girl’s head there was a bald spot with red skin in the shape of a baseball bat. Storks bring cherries. Cherries eaten by a cat will cause fits. Cherries in the house come from dust. A friend is slain every time you eat a cherry, or ejaculate. |
Beloved Escapee
Out of longing, you rowed into the horizon, dented it in fact. Cringe. The brain shrinks at such responses the gulls give the sea, the sea gives itself, a discourse we are always on the outside of, even drowning. Oh, you said known world, not gnome world. That makes all the difference or I wish it would but I suspect it’s just a matter of magnification, whether the mite be giant monster or the great calamity of an orange-ade spill. In the meantime as it always is except in childhood when it’s too early or always too late, in the meantime I remain ornament to the miniature golf course, subterfuged with rain. The tricky part is how life dissolves to tics relieved every now and then by seizures, anemones of light spiking from your head, a voice from the clouds plenty loud yet you the only one to notice, unrepentant truant that you are, sprung, at large. Take me with you next time, okay? I promise not to tattle.
Another Poem about Ohio
They haven’t been filled in yet. His hat is empty. No faces. Someone drew them from behind. A family or a magazine. They are Ohio. Flat. Heavy machinery in the foreground. Their hair is solid black which means their clothes are white. White and thin as paper. Between front and back there is some poetry. Sometimes. And fiction too. Beside them someone wrote the number 13. This does not mean they are unlucky. Only that it is summer. They are dressed accordingly. Perhaps their ankles are cold. There is a son, a daughter. I could be making this up. For sure the sky is blue— it always is in black and white. And her hair is long. She is the mother. They live in a small apartment with no dishwasher. This does not necessarily refer to them. They are a family that knows how to operate heavy machinery safely. Maybe they are dead. But this is Ohio— a family, a forklift— it is hard to say.
