CUR

CUR

He was envious of many things.
The floor was composed from wood
and other earthly phrases and he
wished he could be from earth as well.
He paced his one-room domicile in time
to the deathrattles of branches wicking
and chipping at the glass and stone.

Where did that water come from if not
the oceans which he loathed: neighborly
waves in compositions calculated to
decompose the thoughts; dislodge the wants
inside the structured dreams that said,
“This is a storm, this is a rain,
this is the murdering rush and grams
and all the measurements in sum
which speak your lack of quality.”

If he could look like them he would.
If he could touch like them, he would not.
To stretch his muscles in that fashion
might betray the things he borrowed.
But his eyes could wander, could stray;
could pry apart the flesh and sounds;
could imitate the envious hounds.

Tags: poetry

INSVAII THE GOOD KINGDOM

INSVAII THE GOOD KINGDOM

That early afternoon air was crisp and salted well from the eastern sea, and the ship was salted too. She had spent strenuous weeks on the waters and now it was time to go home. The sails were full; the winds were good. The men did their work, and it wouldn’t be long at this pace. The captain shouted orders. But they none of them could be complacent, not now. This was after all a brutal time, and the other three ships were company for rocks and fish and sand at the bottom of the sea, one week to the south.

A man called something down from the crow’s-nest. Another ship on the horizon, flying the Southern Empire’s colors: gray-and-gold. Gray for the thunderstorms and gold for the sand. She was a sleeker sort of vessel, built for running down other ships; she would have half the guns, but every man and woman on that ship would be a warrior, and besides, those guns would be built for short-range destruction of an unprecedented scale.

The captain called for stations and all the crew went, double-time. They loaded the cannons and then they waited. The other ship would come up broadside; this ship had intentionally ridden as near to the coastal reefs as possible. There was close to zero chance, as far as gamblers were concerned, that the ship would suffer no damage at all. In the ideal, there would be no fires, but they all knew: at least a few would die. The knowledge did not faze a single person among them. This was the sort of thing for which they’d enlisted.

A young man, almost yet a boy, with short brown hair and bright brown eyes, stood upon the gun deck, at the center-most cannon. He wore a fine uniform in blue-and-black that hung loose at some parts of his body, particularly the shoulders and hips. Metal chevrons adorned his shoulders, but the rest of the crew ignored him as they prepared the other guns. He did not look down the gun’s barrel, or at anything at all, really. He appeared almost as if he had been separated from his father or mother, a boy who had wandered onto a ship that had then sailed before he could disembark.

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Tags: fiction

A DULL AND MUDDY-METTLED RASCAL

For this particular red-haired fellow, history was a tool like any other. Sometimes it’d be a scalpel-and-sewing-kit for barbers; other times, a thick bagful of bricks. When he wrote, history was inside his bones. It escaped in every breath and he made no effort to retain it. The thing he did pursue, always, was a continuing education. For the larger portion of the past one-and-a-half years, he’d avoided the province. Circumstances both within and beyond his control had caused him to make that conscious choice. He paused, now, taking a long swallow of whisky, which was essentially history itself, and burned just the same. He summoned forth a particular afternoon and the evening that followed it and sought to learn what he could, having traveled the necessary distance, chronologically speaking.

The red-haired fellow milled through the crowds with some deftness. Despite that, his dress announced him a foreigner to the grand city. He made no show of adopting the latest fashions, which moved at a cannonball’s pace down a very steep grade; instead he favored a styling of shortcoat, vest, shirt, and trousers that perhaps had occupied a week or two of handsome fame, then receded into history.

As he moved, the disparity in wealth showed itself in what occupied the space beneath his boots. Dirt gave way to rough stone, then to cobbled stone and paved walkways. He pressed himself against the side of a building to avoid a crush of tittering young women and men — taking careful note of their physical attributes with measured glances — then pushed open the doors and maneuvered inside. The establishment was impeccably kept, and played host to tables, benches, chairs, and counter-tops arranged in strange patterns which were in fact extraordinarily, geometrically precise. Most of these aforementioned tables, benches, chairs, and counter-tops were occupied by persons of some degree of status; their costuming was fine and their speech was not coarse.

Nearly everything inside was carved from a sturdy, dark wood. Behind the main bar, which extended almost the entire length of the building, a girl — probably not older than sixteen or seventeen — seemed to dance back and forth, managing various cups and glasses with surprising dexterity; her brown hair danced in a ponytail; she wore an apron. A middle-aged man with thin streaks of gray in his brown hair and beard spoke quietly in the local tongue, but the weight of his presence commandeered attention; he also wore an apron. They were the only two employees. They served coffee in what was likely the most popular coffee-house in the entire city. Well, for this week, at least.

The red-haired fellow took a corner table, one of the few not already occupied, and immediately presumed an obtusely-angled slouch upon his chair. The table had very little share of the waning afternoon light from the windows. He gestured at the girl with two fingers; though she did not make eye contact with him, she nodded while balancing full trays on both of her palms. A few moments later there appeared two cups of coffee in front of him. In the span of time it took for him to look down at the cups of coffee then up, the girl was already back behind the bar. He hypothesized that she could be a fine actress, and made a mental note to find her should he ever receive rumors that this particular coffee shop had fallen into ruin.

He was still watching her, sidelong, when another fellow seated himself at the table. This fellow had a tremendous black beard, the sort that was both wild and cultivated all at the same time. He wore appropriate attire, given the environment, but it did not exactly fit him in an complimentary fashion. His black hair was cropped short — likely because if it weren’t, it would rampage over his scalp and out into the world like kudzu.

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Tags: fiction

VENICE

VENICE

Almond blossoms cruciate the afternoon
in which the sun crouches leopard-like
then by twisting suffer the blows unshed
the proclamations unproclaimed.
Follow then the unslicked roadways
repainted to become the outstretched cries
of gulls in jungles, whales enwinged.
In an orchard the cephalopods scream:
this cage was built by your hands,
not ours, never ours, over hours
and daylight expenditure reports
which decline the tremendous years.
A child of indeterminate gender screams:
this tank reflects no light but contains
almost enough water to drown the ghosts
inside the choking dolphins and my lungs
not my lungs suffice, deflate, shrivel
into the fetal position and classically.
How many words can I expend to expound
the diagonal slice across a tautness,
exemplified, a problem set of skin and
crocodilian mythology, double-stapled fine.
Look inside the calculus and you might see
what I see when the leviathan screams:
no swim the gutters inside elbows;
sing well the harvest and the gall.

Tags: poetry

WHAT YOU ARE MADE OF IS WHAT, EXACTLY

WHAT YOU ARE MADE OF IS WHAT, EXACTLY

Marrow bled from her mouth like ebon panels
and it was all lies, lies, lies.
Those bones, askance, angle for prey
without Euclid to guide them; she pressed
a grocery list into my palm and said
well now I mean can’t you see what this is,
this is an axiom about the place you called home.
This is the music that carried you to me.
Gazelles’ horns scream the melody through
the gaps between branches in stunted trees.
That’s the blood inside your ears and when
it spills, rushes, breaks the levees,
I’ll be there to sue the governments
for all their negligence, which collects
in piles labeled chronologically.
First the neck with parabolic curves
second the jaw in a minor key and sharp
third the wrist which wraps around the cuff
and strangles my shrinking eyes until
gasping for breath my eyes burst the surface
in a shower of hawks, shrieking.
For the record I loved the marrow more.

Tags: poetry

COUNTRY SONG

COUNTRY SONG

Well yeah she had wings of course they all do
and I didn’t hesitate to pull the feathers off
one by one until they covered the apartment floor
as a record for her that I had been there before.
They were white they were black they were gray
and I pulled them ’till I could have made a coat
and it would have been warmer than any old coat
’cause any other coat would’ve made me choke.
When I was done there surely was some blood
among the feathers all across the apartment floor
but hey she didn’t mind she gave me her halo too
and I snapped it over my knee snapped it clean in two.
This is how I loved her I named her Elizabeth
and I sliced the country with broken halo halves
like knives I planted flags and kept the feathers close
conquered and killed a thousand thorns per rose
and when I returned I said to her this is all I got
your wings in pieces your halo in two and a sword
and well I’m sorry to say that that’s broken too.
She did not reply just pulled me to the window
pointed out to the sky and ripped my feathers off
my back and I didn’t flinch at all but I bled yeah
and isn’t that what feathers are really for
isn’t that what feathers are really for

Tags: poetry

ROLE-PLAYING GAME

ROLE-PLAYING GAME

He stands in front of a fortress hewn from whiterock and hellstone. Though the thunderclouds drum a military hymn above his head, he is not nervous. This is something he has done before. The wooden drawbridge is down and the portcullis is open; the fortress invites him. He wears boiled leather and undyed cotton and a sword upon his right hip, daggers in bandoliers across his chest. He steps onto the drawbridge. A steel arrow slides into his right eye socket with enough velocity to push through his brain and he dies instantly. He blinks. He stands in front of a fortress hewn from whiterock and hellstone. This is something he has done before. He approaches from a different angle; he notes the positioning of the murder-holes. He knows he is being watched. Now he sprints forward, then tucks into a shoulder-roll, then he is up and somersaulting through the air, and then he is through the portcullis, into the open-air courtyard. Somewhere deep within the fortress, a beast roars with the force of a thousand thousand years’ malice. A sharp and sudden pain needles through his head, but disappears near as sharply. There, in the courtyard: an opponent clad all in metal save for his black eyes, holding a long spear. He steps forward and draws his sword.

He recalls something from his childhood: a song, a lullaby, sung in calcified tones. The words escape him, hanging at the corners of his mind like the frayed edges of curtains in abandoned manses. In this moment of distraction, his opponent charges forward and launches a flurry of thrusts with the spear. He is caught off-balance; he parries, leans, dodges, but then the spear digs through his right thigh. Blood seeps through his trousers and onto the dirt. He falls to one knee and his opponent drives the spear through his heart. He blinks. He stands in front of a fortress hewn from whiterock and hellstone. He evades the arrows, moves through the courtyard, engages the opponent with his sword, presses the momentum, steps around the opponent’s side and slashes out against the back of the opponent’s right knee. The opponent falters; he stabs through the eye-slit of his opponent’s helmet. When the other ceases movement, he withdraws his sword and walks forward to the inner doors. He pauses; he hears scuffling on stone from the ramparts above. He looks upward. Boiling oil pours over his skin and inside his eyes and ears and mouth. He blinks. He stands in front of a fortress hewn from whiterock and hellstone.

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Tags: fiction

I AM A BURDENED BEAST

I AM A BURDENED BEAST

Riding a skywhale is not so fierce a proposition
as one might imagine from the dinner table.
It could be like riding a BMW motorcycle
if the motorcycle were a thousand times the size
and wore blue and gray and silvered iron skin
and breathed the heavy breath of a creature that
knows the value in maintaining strong relationships.
I use a saddle cut from leather, just as clavicles
cut through leather and other hardened exhalations.
My reins are carved out of recycled bulletproof vests:
no better material for bondage than what can repel
contemporary blood-and-gristle/transmit moments.

And so we soar and roam
at cruising altitudes,
rending clouds for water
and my skywhale devours
seabirds by the flock.

She sings just like other whales and cannot fathom
the spite of maritime animals, with their spears
and gnashing teeth and bioluminescent stalks.
Neither can I. We prefer the sky, whether
stained and bleached by lightning and sleet or
bearing within its stomach all snow that ever was or
chorusing the sun’s ignorant heat in three-fourths’ time.
Sometimes I stand when I am brave, and the wind
pushes back against me with the reassurance withheld
for a young man who can ride a beast like this.
There is no better material for bondage than
what can carry me beyond the blood-and-gristle below.

And so we soar and roam
at cruising altitudes,
rending clouds for water
and I blithely devour
seabirds by the flock.

Eventually I will return to land, to rocks and dust
and the grasping trees in autumn’s funereal glare.
I will throw off the leather saddle and the reins
and look my skywhale in her morphous eyes
and say to her that she is as free as she ever was,
which is the same as saying that she was never mine.
But for now we are both beasts for a time and
I swallow the ice and the light and the moon at
ten nautical knots per hour, and I do it gladly;
there is no price that I would not pay for this.
If I had wings I would not be bound to her,
but if I had wings I would not be bound to her.

Tags: poetry

LEVIES

LEVIES

Handsome gentlemen in French-pressed suits
do homage to their kings.
Where did they come from.
The forests, the fields, The Field
in Sweden tharum-thumps in their ears;
they stride down the downtown street
with loafered smiles: thin, recently resoled.
In they swoop to seize the bar and
crow-like murder for bottles of wine,
more wine, more wine. These are refined,
instilled with values coaxed
from prior readings: Descartes before
David Foster Wallace. Such names are
always whispered and so and then
the whispers collate into sheets,
collapse into shouts for curricula vitae
(annotated beside — another bottle of wine,
the best, garçon) impressed into the solid wood
beneath their young, gentlemanly hands.
Until who can say where ends the wood and
begins the too-soft skin.
They do not dance,
never learned how, how to dance
when you speak like Prometheus’s Paris Review
(more clay than prestige), write like
Giapetto’s McSweeney’s (all wood, no wit).
Easier to beg forgiveness.
Apologies, sweet girl, I have Parkinson’s
or something like it. I owe my
life to Jean-Martin Charcot. Garçon,
garçon, more wine, so that I may
do homage to my kings.
Did you know them? I forgot them in tomorrow.

Tags: poetry

GOOD SCIENCE

GOOD SCIENCE

Crumbling manufacture the postulated theorem:
dogs were made to kill, not hound.
Prove in three steps or less.
I strangled a pulmonary girl while diving
into Europa’s southernmost ocean.
Such refreshing chill against
the bristles of Sunday. She said afterward,
two fingers outstretched, “I left
the ignition on.” We spurned budgetary
concerns, went to Kepler next. Pressed
our faces to windows and played pretend:
summoned more venom than we had;
were ready for certified knives
to slice out our abdomens and serve.
Butter being in short supply
we rocketed to another world, landed,
and declared the season to be autumn.
There I touched her cheek, then
she touched my hip, then
with glycerined smiles
we mattered into the dark.

Tags: poetry