after you cut
down the dead
trees
the field yawns
and gives for the first
time in twenty years
a glimpse
of red beyond the shuddering
loblollies—decaying
metal and wood teeth
the remains of man’s work
no life except
a gray body
shell of hollow skin
danger danger flashing floodlights
laying bare my red hawk mind
extracting talons from the skin
of a mangled rabbit or dead horse what
does it matter you stay either way
to watch me tear at the flesh and not cry once no
you won’t see me weep this time no
you don’t own me anymore no
not in the boneyard not in the moonhouse
not in the field where i kill and oh do i
kill yes i do
Searching your trench coat,
I looked for truths, found instead
a 1969 penny and a Green Room matchbook—
I resisted the flame.
Pockets, lined with mothed holes
and a stained handkerchief,
not my mother’s shade of red.
What can we ever know, Dad?
This urge to rummage our dead.
Like Gimmickry watch like gimmickry with wonder with patience take big pie promises when they come along bulge my belly glass my eyes spur my devotion with the smell of your hair wet and standing affected somehow shrink my wonder shape my tongue dig my grave when I’m dead and gone Aaron Warnock comes from […]
Read more "Like Gimmickry"All the mournful songs They pick the finest days To play from the treetops Where the orioles whistle And dogs howl at the feet Wailing branches bridge Into dirges at sunset When I go out for a walk Along the shore – Saturnine sea sighing To my face as I gather Pebbles for a headstone. […]
Read more "All the mournful songs"Seven Women In Line at the Pharmacy at Dusk We are quiet and courteous. The woman with Tylenol lets the bent-over woman go in front with a cart full of incontinence briefs. A man tends the scanner and register. His shirt tail needs tucking in at the back and his hair could use a slicking […]
Read more "Seven Women In Line at the Pharmacy at Dusk"Holly Day’s poetry has recently appeared in Plainsongs, The Long Islander, and The Nashwaak Review. Her newest poetry collections are A Perfect Day for Semaphore (Finishing Line Press), In This Place, She Is Her Own (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), A Wall to Protect Your Eyes (Pski’s Porch Publishing), I’m in a Place Where Reason Went Missing (Main Street Rag Publishing Co.), The Yellow Dot of a Daisy(Alien Buddha Press), Folios […]
Read more "The Mouse"Trevor Root is a poet in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work is published or forthcoming in :lexicon Journal and Eunoia Review. song for a coffin in fugue: elegy for deleuze whose body is become an opaque circus or in the morning the dead thrush’s ribcage is a barricade lined with miner bugs miniature laborious tasks like handwriting the […]
Read more "song for a coffin in fugue: elegy for deleuze"
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