The Banana

Forgive me child, now a man
with each of us sitting on our sides
of this car, feeling the world speed
by with its yellow fields
never naming anything
not even laughing at Calder Park
or Bob Jane’s face or Sunbury.

I am sorry it has come to this
speechless highway thrum.

Here, you used to ask
about how can a grey line
in the atmosphere
split the blue sky in half.

But you’ve just spent most of a sweet song
trying to connect your phone to Bluetooth
and didn’t say a word to me
when I said
it’s worth taking this tune in.

But it’s just Islands in the Stream
is all you said, never looking up from your screen.

You used to say things about people
we passed on the road
like what they did
or how fast can we leave them behind.

Now you’re wordless
eating a banana
because that is the only fruit
you’ve ever liked to eat.
You seem to eat it and forget to breathe.

Did you know I know everything
you have ever eaten?

And you eat everything so angry now
and I feel so sorry it has come to this

you knowing what I will say
to everything you mention

knowing when you reach to turn
the radio back to golden oldies
I’m going to say
I hate Billy Joel.

Meanwhile the banana
in your hand looks so good.
All I want for you is to look
down at it and take it in
perhaps smell it, follow its lines
do what we all do with good fruit.

Your stare now is so solid
as the banana browns
in the air conditioning.

And it’s the banana
so strong fleshed but bruising
that gets me –
just bring it to your lips
and before biting
just hold it there
let it touch you.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

big bird

           a.           the violin

           when big bird steps out of his apartment he runs quickly down some stairs he sees a boy standing there looking at him big bird creeps past then keeps on running the boy is chasing him and that’s when he steals his violin

           down in the street there are many balloons and there are floating lattices big bird looks into some mirrors he sees tomatoes, a boat……. big bird has a violin lesson he sits on a chair next to a cat he looks through the stained glass window big bird pretends to read a sheet of music he hums and he whistles.… when it becomes big bird’s turn he plays the music magically he’s been practicing his whole life.

big bird has a job driving a truck he carries his violin with him to work he fixes the truck with a spanner and he takes it for a test drive. when big bird gets hungry he goes out for some lunch he orders beans at the cafe and he leaves his violin behind
           big bird gets taken into a dark house he can’t see any lights and he gets beaten up….. big bird heads back to the pub he heads past ernie who doesn’t want to talk to him
           big bird washes the dirt off his face and they all ask him to play some music they tell him that he’s a musician but they only pay him with a bread roll… they don’t understand that big bird has a family to feed

           b.           a dream

there is writing written in lipstick on the wall
           a black disc and a scene in black and white
it is daytime and then nighttime there are mountains and sunflowers daytime
           and then nighttime there’s a desert and then a forest. rain and then sun big bird sees someone standing at the end of a hall
           long and then white with a sun and then rain the person is far off and people in hats start struggling at the door …
           big bird sees a crowd of them rushing toward the sun going through white halls
           jesters are just standing there looking
           they are looking at someone who is summoning and pushing with their arms.
           big bird looks three times and this time he sees a man who is mad who is smoking in his room a man who is all in the dark….. big bird sees the people painted blue and he is painted blue too…. when big bird is out on the street he is tempted by a doll in the window it’s trying to sell him something but when he gets it big bird is stuck out all by himself out on a blue field out in front of a windstorm that is driving at him….
           somebody holds big bird tenderly in their arms but the train has already arrived to take big bird away.

           c.           the hunt

big bird comes back from the hunt but he finds that the door is closed
           he has a look inside but all he sees is a man with a scythe.
big bird checks the wallpaper he pulls the curtain down he shines the candle over a picture
           he thought he saw a bug in the corner of his eye.

           on top of the house in the morning big bird sees a statue
the lady is a chicken and she is holding a horn, she is greeting the day
           she is getting everybody together and telling them to get dressed the lady is giving the signal
           big bird awakes to a bear by his bed
           it has a brown fuzzy dressing gown on
the bear looks at big bird and it points up to the sky it leaves a private letter. big bird goes out to the pond where someone is digging a hole
           he hears some old men laughing while they dig
he finds himself in an orchard with his lover big bird sees her eating apples and grapes
           big bird hears the big dinner bell ringing and he starts running

big bird gets to the room of hanging wheels some are stored like heads in cabinets
           they are heads from the carts which will take you away. big bird sees some encyclopedias he sees a window covered in paint
           big bird tries to look out but he can’t.
a pestle for herbs is for a girl going mad.
big bird hears the trumpet. very soon he hears a shout and a gunshot.
           the bear has been struck and big bird knows that he has to die too.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

tonight

tonight they are calling for the end of the world. it’s no big deal. haven’t you heard? the announcement of the apocalypse turns to static noise in the ears of those for whom the world is not a home, but a playground of profit, dead children, and social cohesion. for the rest of us, we sit in rows. (death sits between me and you like a third person / we remember everything, at least in our bones). you turn on the news, and the screen lights up flicking with blood. there is a body under my bed. it is business as usual. i typed this in a trance. we are all sick. we are all tired. did you not hear me? the world is on fire, and so are you. elon musk lauds over my twitter account. (there is nowhere left to scream). we are all possessed by ghosts, by demons, by monsters. a spectre is haunting: the spectre of afterpay. adani, raytheon and the rest of them too. they enrapture our spirits and disembody us slowly. there are bloodstains all over my carpet. i don’t know where they came from. the channel switches. i can’t remember what it was like to command my own limbs. i watch them disintegrate into dust and choke softly on the smoke they leave behind. (‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’) it is only with you that tomorrow feels possible, feels beautiful, feels worthy at all. can you promise me this? promise me this. when you get there, when you see her, if she’s breathing, if we turned it around, if it’s different this time—will you save me a seat?
Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

ROCKSTAR SHIFT

they say you should try everything once
but if that’s really the case i might be
stuck inside this warehouse taproom forever
and if it weren’t for the fact that i bush-bashed
my way through the last two months,
i may have presented myself earlier:
neither shaken nor stirred
dirty and still not free, full of fissured
(re)issues of physical graffiti sticky fingers
are you experienced
nevermind

all i’m saying is that mick jagger is 81 and done
that the horrors of hospitality are quotidian at most
neverending at best & good stories at least
as for me
turning 21 was something i’ll never do again
turning down a management position
for a $1/hr raise was something
i’ll have to keep between us
and if you’re not 10 minutes early
you’re late sometimes you don’t know
if your phone is autocorrecting you
like when i texted last night to say
i suddenly had a revolution:
Responsible Service of Alcohol
is an oxymoron

everything i know
about hospo and rock’n’roll
was handed down to me
by the world’s leading microbial ecologist
we dated for a while
but you can only talk about bear shit
for so long before
the sexual tension becomes
unbearable so
what will you give me
if i can split the g? super

and a souvenir bucket hat?
ok
you never know what’s around
the corner hotel
and that’s why i’ve resorted to screaming
at every right angle i see screaming
jesus wouldn’t have taken a 10% merch fee
and why i’ve resorted to ending every conversation
like a copy+pasted job application
i’m being as sincere as a guitar solo:
thanks for the opportunity
because this isn’t the future
any of us applied for
and i got tired of seeing everything
as a metaphor
tired of the leather pants tired of resignation
letters and b(e)sides
BOH shifts are better because everyone’s unsexy
in crocs together and happiness
just hangs there
like a ribbon microphone for you
to grab and scream into

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Protection spell against EO 14147 through EO 14291

after Kenji C. Liu

The days of potential are over
potential catastrophe
potential disaster.

The days are now the days
of injustice
of horror
days we never thought would be.

Take sage stick. Draw closed circle in salt.

In the Sunshine State, high on the stench of permission
healthcare is revoked for children
precious, precious children
precious, precious unless…

Take pine needle. Burn cone.

The days of denial are over
the days of disbelief.
The days are here to hurry up
the days are here to believe:

the depths of hate are here
the lava is over the lip
burning a fast course
(searing a path to you).

Grind charred cone to dust. Take wine.

These days are the days for plain speaking
symbol has become cloud.
These days are the days for naming:

The blood of the children.
The blood of the rounded up.
The blood of the displaced.
The blood of the ill denied medicine.
The blood of the carrying girl.
The blood of the dysphoric now over the edge.
The blood of the wrong one percent.

Take moonstone. Intone prayer:

The blood of the bodies
the blood of the bodies
the bodies, the bodies
the bodies, the bodies
the bodies, the bodies
the bodies of blood.


Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

naked

powdered concrete. quashes/fills mouth. eyes. ears. nose. blood. milked by missiles. ’til it. dampens the earth. a father. likens extracting the body. of. his. son. to pulling. out the root of his heart. his heart. his heart in the. dirt plugging. the lips. of his son. 10-year-old. daughter cradles the. shoes. of her mother all. she has left. keening in. dirt. over grey. powdered ghost shoes. medic delivers. foetus. to hands of. man in the dirt. mother laboured ’til. the dirt overtook. her. a truck. delivers. 170 bodies. decomposing. nameless. reeking of the. world’s disinterest. survivors stand. at gravesites to. provide last rites. to. unidentified body pieces robbed. of their rights. while those of us. with mouths. unblocked have. rights. obligations. to speak ever. louder like. journalists. who gave. their lives. unprotected by. Press Vests and. their best. intentions. listed by International Federation of Journalists. including the method of murder. Mohamd Al-Salhi bullet…Samer Abu Daqqar missile strike on hospital…Rizq Al-Gharabli bomb…Mohamed El-Reefi bullet while collecting flour from aid delivery…Saher Akram Rayan while assisting neighbour…. Haider Ibrahim al-Masdar strike on media tent…Wafa Abu Dabaan in refugee camp…Hamza Abdul Rahman Murtaja airstrike on school…Abdullah Shakshak quadcopter…all relying on. truth to prevail. orphans and. widows distraught. desperate. for their. pleas. to extract compassion. from the. other side of the. screens in safe homes white. homes. like writers/actors/artists. attempting to voice. the opposite. to. the dominant narrative. speak true. it doesn’t always. go well. the powerful get antsy. join to create elaborate. stories. to confuse you. or don’t even bother to. say anything at all. which is the best way. to. shut. down. debate. about the start and the date. the value of. some lives. over others. followed by disingenuous claims. to integrity. veracity. the tyrannous. relying on lies. reversing the narrative. about who is. suffering. and who’s not. still. the truth remains. bare.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

the bougiest garage in thornbury

Click image to zoom.



Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

‘empty and faraway lands’

Operations: Buffalo Antler Totem Mosaic





descent of darkness
hell-fire prowls antipodean skies

radiation strobe-lights country
freeze-frames bodies into rag-doll skeletons

a biosphere swallows
black mist



Maralinga Monte Bello Emu Field





deep in bunkers
watchers lie

ghost images fade to sepia
in photographs locked in empire’s vault

a country’s heart fused
into broken glass



Uranium Beryllium Plutonium




Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Lactarius Milfing

this is an introduction to the creamy mycology of the mighty woodlands in primal sanctuary life and rot are wrought together through fungus so I must learn all the names in iNaturalist conversant with my surrounding ecology poking in the undergrowth for Lactarius an indigo milk cap weeping latex a node in a network of things within which everything is edible once so suckle on a jostling of fruiting bodies in the unmaking of a fallen maple golden oysters glow from sloughing bark gills velvety on the fingertips and damp as the slime mould brawny in the loam all the earth’s infinitesimal efforts in splendid vigorous vulgarity puffballs farting out millions of lives and stinkhorns wooing flies with stench agonised and ecstatic through the dirt a destroying angel rising begetter of slow and terrible deaths so I am pressed to check and check again my species IDs my risk appetite that fled when nothing could compare with the pleasures of a foraged feed seeking the ultimate of earthstars its pale spores spurting rivulets of sweetest flux that pour back into the soil which is our mother so we marvel at the strangeness of this milk

novelty horrors of the infinite fusion machine blending childhood monstrosities into interconnected oneness the wetness of the Pokedex as fluid as curdling milkshakes until I become utterly convinced of Miltank’s supremacy that little cow so proudly udder forward even as she is bred with too many beasts she retains her essential qualities these pixel mommy milkers perky despite the individual’s dissolution she can be anything and still herself a legendary thunderbird mantled in sloppy clotted cream splatters or that wrestler champ a beefy hunk of spunk posing with teats out like raw bratwursts a painter smearing her own fluids on canvas a false flower squirting paralytic buttermilk a pregnant hound dragging a heifer’s udder and when you mate her with a god she is seraphic upon wings of cosmic crema creating the universe with the question got milk? and I know now why our god left to the shops for milk and never came back to the profound wrongness of Milfing a pinkly polluted orb with noxious fumes turned spumes of original elixir her nips dripping colostrum rich nectar secretions I share with my friend who is herself a MILF knowing babes have no choice but to drink



Notes: ‘Lactarius’ names a family of milk-cap mushrooms that ooze creamy fluid. ‘Milfing’ refers to a fan-made Pokémon fusion combining
the cow ‘Miltank’ with the toxic bomb ‘Koffing’ – more similarly cursed Pokémon fusions are described in the poem and sourced from the wiki here.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

The Catalogue of the Ships (Il. 2. 494-760)

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

My angels, tied, like a kite

I

This morning, I showered like it mattered.
I rubbed shea butter into my skin
like I was polishing something I might someday become.
The scent stayed on my fingers
like a ghost that had made peace with its haunting.
I cleaned my ears like a gentle archaeologist.
Gold. Amber. The body’s slow apology
for having to protect itself.

II

They say human hands aren’t webbed anymore,
but mine keep reaching like they forgot.
Like some part of me still believes
I was made to swim through things—
uncertainty, silence,

us.

III

I’ve been trying not to hurt anyone,
so I buy saran wrap in bulk
from the surplus store on 24th—
aisle of plastic gloves and off-brand pop tarts.
After brushing my teeth
in pajamas patterned with tiny sheep,
I stretch the wrap across my apartment
from dining table to front door—
a clear, trembling tripwire
meant to keep the world out.
It wavers in the hallway light,
like a thought I can’t quite finish.

I call my feather boas angels.
Bright orange, the color of sunlit persimmons.
I twist them into my hair
like I’m on my way to an opera
that ended before I was born.
Something grand and loud,
the kind of performance you leave
with your hands trembling
from having clapped too long.

IV

I walk like someone who’s watched for ghosts
but forgot about sidewalk cracks.
I can’t find north without your shadow,
but I can point out
a chicken bone in the gutter,
a jack of clubs caught in the wind,
a velvet couch sagging at the curb
like someone once loved there.

I like things that flap—
ideas, sparrows, my own excuses.
I tell myself I can turn this around,

that the stoplight won’t stay red forever.
At intersections, my palms mimic the signal.
And while I wait,
you dig through your coat pockets
for that blue lighter that sparks
but never catches.
We look at each other,
and it is okay.

We walk anyway.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Blue Russet

It was my week of smelling beautifully. Oil of orange, cream of parsley. Delicate mist from clouded glass. It was my week of taking my perfumed neck and anointed cheeks out into sun where covens of wing’d opals erupted into swarms above dog shit they’d been brooding over. It was my week of some sort of exercise in the middle of the grass, an old woman shifting weight from knee to knee as though getting comfortable for a hefty prayer. The sun set and I took my scent inside. Lightning high up in the window came and went like the blue whiz of a security light. At that a phrase bubbled from someplace. I thought it a bird: Blue Russet. But no, two colours I’d collided. My image search showed dual-tone glitter, a silver car under UV light, blue potatoes cut to cubes, a wren with a brown vest. I added bird and was fed a headline Most Beautiful Blue Birds which I read not as a category but an unfinished sentence. Most beautiful blue birds do what, exactly? During this time I was intoxicated by an album. It was my week of intoxication. I played it every day, sometimes five times. The man who wrote it was very young or seemed very young relative to his lyrics and voice which I found uncharacteristically rich for a person his age. My friend and I corresponded about this and agreed we were more creatively interesting at 22 because, as she put it, of sweet oblivion and upward curiosity. It was my week of aching and inhabiting old rooms with lively intent. I entertained repainting or moving furniture radically about. I resolved to clench my ass cheeks and claim feelings with the narrowed slit. It was my week of finding affinity with this resolution and the inexplicable desire to run credit cards through my friends’ asses that breached the dawn water of hot springs we splashed nudely in. I did not vocalise my desire. That one but also many others. At four AM I am gifted a slaughtered possum and the feeling I am doomed to express affection forevermore in impenetrable languages. My dowry is a thousand dead skinks. Things are getting worse. Or things were always worse. Or things were worse then got worse once more. Breathing is pleasing. Birds again.
Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

The Legendary Dean Kalcoff

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Commandment

This poem is made of collaged text and image fragments from books on sea creatures, cricket and colonialism.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

DFTD Zuihitsu

Sound lives at the border of light, and yet you only feel your heart beat. My mother says that’s how memory works.

After my night-light phase, I could only sleep with a bundle of plush animals. Nothing felt more permanent than pitch-black rooms, effigies of disappearance within arm’s reach.

The mouth contorts to an uncurled circle when it bargains. Five more minutes before bed is nonnegotiable, a nonstarter. The bends of our mouths morph, expand. Bodies always absorb more than they intend.

In elementary school, my teacher once called ‘suns’ the perfect palindrome. Identifiable from any angle. Everyone in the classroom wrote it out, spun their notebooks in circles on their desks. The day filled with redundancy.

My phone jitters with texts: Time heals all wounds / Just wait it out. We speak as if circulation will always run its course. But who will we blame when all our scapegoats go extinct?

On Sunday mornings I sit still, folding time like laundry.

If anything, Edvard Munch was a psychoanalyst. He always saw how life was sequenced: Despair before The Scream, tongues before the fire.

Finding blemishes on your face when you wake up is proof that disasters are authentic.

Mommy said the parts of the fruit we eat are called its flesh, my friend’s daughter announced before jabbing her straw into the side of an apple. Juice shot through the apparatus. Flesh softened with alleviated pressure.

A kiss, not of death, but of surplus, overgrown and full circle. A cannibalism: shapeless and undetectable.

Despite the blood, this poem is not an animal.

The logics of dimples, mushrooms in worship, touch of the stethoscope. We learned to depend on the rhythms of breath, the simplest ideogram.

I rarely question things already named. Devils were named after their blistering outcries. But recently, they began to bleed more. Many vowels refused to fit in their mouths. Even after their gums took new soundscapes, we still called them devils while requiems poured from their lips.

One intruding body becoming many inside the walls of its host. Not just the Trojans’ horse but all gifts from the outside.

Anything can be used for measurements. When I get home from work, I show you my hunger by opening my mouth as wide as it can go.

‘Young’ and ‘old’ only explain expectations. Ten years old: a young tortoise, an old dog. Obsessed with my own understandings of the world, I forget to talk about the years themselves.

On the other side of the crosswalk, the little green person who is me flashes urgently, wavering between existences. A church bell resounds. Children peel off strips of secrets to share in the yard. I cross the street, bookended by inevitabilities.


Note: “Tongues before the fire” is an allusion to Edvard Munch’s diary entry from January 22, 1892, in which he describes the menacing cloudscape that inspired his most well-known painting, The Scream, by narrating that “there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city.”

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Cold Glare

1

Vivacious blues of the Adriatic bright in morning sun. Sparkle now
like marble, like flecks in limestone buildings curving out to sea.
How they line up like summer revellers before a distant island
imprisoned, from this angle, by the masts of sailing boats. The scene
though, all winter layers. All neat rows outside cafes, where tourists
in puff jackets absorb the blistering glare the water rejects into lips
split by northerly bursts. Into hands that grab for keys, cups, scraps
of sugar sachets. A book cover flapping, imagining itself a bird
ready to take flight into green palms that line the esplanade with
a Roman precision. Their fronds writhing like octopus tentacles caught
in a net, trying to make sense of the world they’ve found themselves in
or how exactly the world makes sense of them. The light blue sky
child-like and free. Stone villas crawl up a hill––jagged cliffs gutted
and filled with beds and sofas and TVs. Small sanctuaries
safe places to dream.


2

A definition of beauty is a simple thing
made difficult in language. When you close your eyes it becomes
more distinct, more articulate. More fleeting, or perhaps more a feeling
of sun warming your aging face still cold from the shade of Split’s
small streets, filtering echoes of Croatian. Harsh and soft consonants.
Cries of gulls. A rattling wine trolley. The Latin and instruments
you imagine would’ve played as Diocletian was ferried across the bay
into his palace. It was the third century then. He had just abdicated.
Had this palace built on his native coast of Dalmatia. You read
that he spent his final days here, tending a vegetable garden, feeling
incessantly dismayed by news of his tetrarchy plunging into chaos.
Your cup slides along the faux-marble table and you catch it, unlike
the blues so perfect, so clear and perfect and materially there. Unlike
the poem that traces. The poem that hears itself a poem and wonders
how long it can sustain itself before collapsing.


3

So often it continues
like this. Cans of soft drink, bottles of wine, washes of oxidised minerals
in stone. Consciousness blobbing like a jellyfish, like a GoPro strapped
to a stick, recording from above the subtle variations thoughts undergo
after a coffee and cigarette while watching wind off the Adriatic animate
storm clouds the sky shapes from water. Like a sculpture of nothing more
than the sculptor. Sometimes there’s a vibrancy in leaving only a sense.
An outline of what is being said, and by whom and for whom. As if
the blues were a thousand year old stone, older still. Writing between
small waves, the inability to make poetry from anything but the calm
intermittent speech of the shore. The red flanno you bought ten years ago
from an LA op shop warms in the sun, releasing the sickly sweet Jasmine smell
of a hostel laundry. The thought of millions of microplastics navigating
the imagination to here. The bright blue Adriatic. Repeating itself
lapping against the stone.


4

Where everything repeats we find interstices.
Small instances of music. A rhythm that demarcates a distinction between
the person we once were and the person we suppose today we might be.
A bridge of glaring light finds you in sun. Day separates the self.
Into epochs of feeling. Millennia of thought. It’s in what we memorialise
toward that we come to a new understanding of the old. And yet
in one sense, a poet seduces nothing but themselves. Reduces themselves
to nothing but an image emptying itself into the world, and in which
the world finds itself emptied into the cold glaring light of day.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Academic presenting masc

The legend was in the way he said legend
Like ripping off a hubcap with his teeth-nail

He’d crapped Tom Cruises bigger than unicorns
Scored reviews on get to the chopper & plinthed
the ivory

Too young to think he was that old anyways
He’d pitied the fools of his own citations

The conference on an ending a means to an end
Or a means

The End

Weekends he roasted chestnuts just to say he had both

He’d never stopped to ask about the father
on the edge of the soccer field

The man who played Ivan Drago
to his USofA attitude

The way A for academic could slouch off a shadow
Scoff at the idea of Bali but fall in-love with a Harley

He was Jackie Channing his way into old age with all the soft edges
of a post Governator sequel

Who comes up with this shit anymore
he was beginning to ask

After he’d met himself in the bar
too cheap to shout

He just wanted to get to the top of the building
Once there he was too scared to look down

Fingers gesticulating in an intext action
A hero’s journey maladaptive to the theory

Micro-anything made him feel insecure

Claude was never coming back

He was exacting his own expendables
Dissertations on an escape plan

Made nervous by the patience of an instagram tile

Who would quote him and where

Whatever said was masc and mass
A return to the rush hour of a soccer field
A point scoring activity that transcended
The league

Ivory or otherwise

Even then he’d had a penchant for obscurity
that made his old man pen his own eulogy

Look at the blade and you miss a kick
Treat your head like the goal if you have to

He was beginning to wonder if
could you still call a trip to Gunnedah a holiday

Like father like son before him
but Western had different connotations then

The question only mattered to his ex-wife
and that was part of the problem

As he tried to pull the f.u. out of funding

The yippee-ki-yay W.N.F’d Christmas
Turned the faculty against him

How many absent father figures
did it take to fill out a panel

Snake-eyes combing through ten years of endnotes

He had to accept the true-lies:
abattoir & administrations were not
the same thing

Of course, all he’d wanted was a world’s best coffee cup
Enough oomph to split open an envelope

Whatever hay-day was a hey dad

His last PhD nibbled the apple before the thought
of running half nude down the street after a wheelie-bin

In the end the affair had seemed like an accident
A mockumentary where the bullet was named Brendan

He was always writing another paper

Though the thesis was no longer a muscle car

His collar & its perpetual shade of cobalt
that he derived from the well

A golden sunset & roll credits

He was named after the dog

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Removal from Corpse

It’s fallacious to expect the dead
to be bathing in broad daylight
let alone a lifeguard to recline more
luxuriously than an archaic torso.
Today the cancer institute volunteers
ask me five questions concerning the future
of sun prevention, only to pay me
with stickers resembling a geometrically
inaccurate scarecrow. What do we mean
when we say make room for the dead?
Like the earth, what I want succumbs.
By the end of the calendar year,
the annual yield of nurses parachuting
into our dreams to salvage everyone
we’ve ever loved will be equal to the ragged
limbs of moonlight pulling out daffodils
the Spring failed to invent in time.
You weep. You rot. The relation
of the relation glimpsed only when
the brain stops. Naturally, you see god.
Naturally, a dog turns the grasses defective
and the story begins again. Over the river
is the soul and through the woods
is the body, to which we always go.
Who tosses these crumbs and who
will use them to pry open the hidden
casket of the horizon? This whole place is dark.
And only once have I walked towards
those distant angels if only to hear
lilacs shivering in the wind.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

poverty

can I make it up the hill    how saying what you think leads to poverty    I sit to rest among the she oaks             how violence leads to poverty    how saying what you think leads to poverty    she was underwater lying in the middle of the road with a sheet of plastic over her head    how violence leads to poverty    how sexual assault leads to poverty    she was underwater lying in the middle of the road with a sheet of plastic over her head    he was saying we can walk under water through the river    how sexual assault leads to poverty    how hard physical labour leads to poverty    he was saying we can walk under water through the river    I was standing on a half-submerged rock    how hard physical labour leads to poverty    these trees shaded me here before my surgery    I was standing on a half-submerged rock    how poetry leads to hard physical labour    these trees shaded me here before my surgery    on a full moon night when we sat at the picnic table talking about getting back together    how poetry leads to hard physical labour    how ill health leads to poverty    on a full moon night when we sat at the picnic table talking about getting back together    they are in flower now    how ill health leads to poverty    they were here when we ran up from our NYE’s picnic on the beach when the storm came    they are in flower now how poverty leads to ill health    they were here when we ran up from our NYE’s picnic on the beach when the storm came    they preside here on the eve of my birthday    how poverty leads to ill health    how poverty leads to housing insecurity    they are here presiding on the eve of my birthday    how the assessment sits there like a toad in the bottom of the well    how poverty leads to housing insecurity    how poverty leads to violence    how the assessment sits like a toad in the bottom of the well    every tree a church    how poverty leads to violence    how poverty leads to the loan to value ratio    every tree a church    I sit among the she oaks    how poverty leads to the loan to value ratio    and the hill
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Downloads

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

wisdom tooth

i’m trying to meditate
while he slices his way into my gums,
saws the tooth into quarters, and yanks the pieces out of my jaw.
i read somewhere the body breaks down codeine and turns only 20% of it into morphine
(a pelagic euphoria muted into a dreamy river of warm).
in a similar way humans are inefficient machines converting time into pleasure,
but are overefficient at converting time into meaning.
every image starts a sequence,
every sequence hatches narrative,
every narrative spines a life.
i want to get better at holding single images inside of my head,
because not every moment is the start
of something else
or the slick wet promise
of something more.

all this to say, half my face is numb, my clouded head makes no sense of it,
and now they’ve thrown away the shards of tooth
i secretly wanted to keep.

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Disorientations in laundry water

“Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?”
— Natalie Diaz, The First Water Is the Body


Insanity (mis)happens when I
exile forty thousand heaves
inside a palm. Watch the dermis
disintegrate into foams of saliva and
grime and the dystopian ferment
of calamansi detergent spilled thin
on a ripple of fingerprints.
Acid swirls: eroding sardonic histories
blemished in the skin of a mouth.
At twenty four, I look at childhood
the way translation disassembles memory:
in held whispers of rusted spoons,
the silt-heavy hush of erstwhile rivers,
a lexicon of tooth-dust,
aversions etched in the wound of wonder vein
lapping backward for a touch.
Childness meant my mother perfuming
her worries in the shape of laundry water.
Small act of unbending solitude
imprisoned in the asterisks of girlhood.
Her hands, suspended in grief,
wrung the cotton until the weave
remembered its own drowning.
I echo her sentiment in the blouse collar
thinned by the wash,
the contours of pleated fabric
relegated to the margin of a balance sheet;
mistake a peso for absolution, hear
the rotten misanthrope
manufacture birdsong in the lilt
of a vesper. The promise of freedom,
estranged in polyester skirts,
now metered by economic impressions
of a postered laugh in the wake of an emergency.
Fancy another document to stare
as it washes the last centavo in her pocket
before the pen marks an [ ].
Elsewhere, we indifference desperation
in grounds where dirt absolves no miracle.
Only a document of domesticated
tiredness, passing monitory despairs
in the husk of an empty townhouse,
walls creased with the salt of her wrists,
paper bills soaked bubble
foaming in endless spin cycles.
Like memory, it recoils and folds. As
conceptual as how the brain conjures
a gesture before a hand
eddies into the air.

Along San Vicente, she tarries
innocence away in the smoke of a wet bend;
the ammonia of nineteen ninety two
clinging against the bed of nails.
Wind displaces only the weight of nostalgia
buried in the lesions of remembering.

If dementia is burden I choose,
let absence be the mother I carry.
Watch me claw at concrete
until wildflowers lull into dirt.
Let me force a wound where
language blisters.
Please, let me put my mouth to it.

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if i were a fish i would not be sashimi-grade

more parasitic & mythological, aguacero de pescado, airbreathing
but sickly, trailing mucus & being taxonomically confused for an
amphibian. a sighting every several years like bluey, phantasm of
the bay. a kind which belongs in the deep sea but deflates when

oxygenated. you’ll never see the rain again. there’s a deluge that
nobody can explain. some fish redistribute their scales and others
hoard; you are either rainbow fish or neoliberal. or a commodity
of eyes and skin picked apart for soup and grafting. mass deaths

because of the bacteria: a mortality event. atlantic salmon on the
rocks precut & ready to be sunned. what better way to go? than in
plague, bloodlet. i dive & can’t see the open water. it swims in my
eyes & school’s out. cruelty is a whetstone but to eat is to love. so

worship & sanctify. among friends there is always a new place to
go. delicacy is the construction of something destroyed but dainty.
jagged open mouth & languid motion, i do not want to move, only
for prey to swim into the belly & for others to be scared to swallow.


Note: This work includes a reference to Marcus Pfister, The Rainbow Fish (1992).

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Self-portrait in a Complex Dither

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