Tag: poetry
-
A Fixed Vocabulary
Is there a word for arriving home after a hot day and finding the place changed, as if everything has been picked up for inspection and put back down in a different spot? What is the word for being surprised by how high the weeds on the train line have grown? What is the word…
-
Connswater
Our river wasn’t a clean river, a mountain stream, a babbling brook, or a silver girl. It was a filthy river, a city river, forsaken, neglected. Long gone, the glory days, when it was thick with trout and where, according to my father, King Billy watered his horses on his way to the Boyne;…
-
Inca Doves
Is it odd to say I thought of you as I pulled a dead dove from the swimming pool? Spine up to God, floating lightly with its bright beak face down. Streams of red outlined the strange sight. I gently scooped him up, ignorant of sex, his eyes closed so gently as if in…
-
you are and onto
neither of you nor not this in stance beside congruities one thing not a way …
-
Soap / Eternity / Rendering
INSTRUCTIONS ON A BAR OF NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY SOAP Do what you want, live how you want. Get it behind your ears and all over the skin you want. Do not think about machines. Read what you will, focus your eyes on grime and slime and free will. Or grace,…
-
Our Wings
Fair is fair, and clear is clean. Clean air is clear, clear air is clean, though I fathom the factories fair fouled it up. Particulate, exudate, aerosols, mud, benzene, dioxins, DDT, blood. Filthy factory runoff grimes up our groundwater. Oozes thin. Gurgles thick. We slide and we slip on greased oilcloth earth. Our dirt is…
-
Liquorice
With drains for legs the rain runs off you And though it’s always cold, (with lead for legs) it’s not wet. Black roots are hard but damp liquorice runs like mascara Making pandas of eyes Heavy like the lid that the scent lifts on memories as distant as feet, Ash boots the fag ends…
-
There are 355 letters in Genesis 4:9-13
An excerpt from a sequence of 31 perfect anagrams of Genesis 4: 9-13 in which Cain shares an apartment with Father K. in a disputed territory. Genesis 4: 9-13 And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? And He…
-
Filth
Covered in filth, a disastrous clumsy brain excavates deep to identify causality. Distrusting and perilous, Broken mirror images echo an unsung nursery rhyme in an incomprehensible language. For unclean, as impure, as spoilt, This one is a crummy little one. She has not made any effort whatsoever, and now has the nerve to…
-
Proper Burial / Clean Machines / Wheat Head
Proper Burial Each thing we take from the earth requires we bury something of equal value. Dinosaurs buried each other, where they fell, feathered, and massive. Still later, we bundle whole ships with furs for warmth, and spices to trade beneath the earth. One age buries another, patting dirt upon civilization. Dogs understand the…
-
Scabies
We holidayed through its incubation. Time spent with family, the large, extended swell of us, in a rented house by a winter sea. What we shared that Christmas would burrow into our warm and secret places, causing us to begin a new year baffled by scratching. The yo-yo trips to doctors, all those different…