Here are a couple poems I published this past winter. I hope you like them, and furthermore, I hope you'll go and check out the other writers in the Scapegoat Review.
About the poems, yeah. Uh. I am nostalgic for the entropy of some aspects of my childhood.Somewhere along the way, as many of us do, I settled like silt in a pond, and these poems help me blow shit up again as I remember and redact and fake the words into remembrances/poems both real and imagined. The persona in these poems is a complex motherfucker, or thinks of himself that way. It's a good thing he's got a low-IQ translator like me.
Abandonment
I watched Uncle Walt pull a fake tittie
out of his inner flannel shirt,
present it to my father like a gift
he ought to bow and scrape for.
Dad laughed and pulled at his beer,
I went off to watch the older kids
fucking behind the old milk house
on the hay left over from years
and years of farming but the farm
had been abandoned—plows still set
in the high grass beside the stone wall,
bob-wire stuck in gray old fence posts
while my brother pumped at a red-haired
girl who threw her head back like a horse
straining at a bit only she could feel,
his white cheeks glistening with sweat.
Farm gone, girl gone, Uncle Walt gone
brother/dad unreachable for reasons known
and unknown; I look back through time
and see myself touching myself,
eight years old, consumed by guilt and fire.
How One Word Connotes a Star
Great White sang something about traveling
across your state line. You'd recently
demilitarized your zone with a razor. The idea
had some appeal. Your sunflashed dad and his short-
barreled shotgun proved us too young. I slipped
my cold hand hipward and he busted out the door
in sweatpants and a camo jacket to say
Nice night kids. Lookit that moon!
Hitched his pants skyward and coughed.
I returned my hand to your safe shoulder.
He went to bed dog-howling nervous;
the bedroom light stayed on all week.
In the night sky your navel supernovaed
to the rhythm of my probing tongue
and flared like cinnamon in my mouth.
We lit out for a galaxy of trembling we
worked all night to reach it while the stars
tittered behind their stone-white hands.
About the poems, yeah. Uh. I am nostalgic for the entropy of some aspects of my childhood.Somewhere along the way, as many of us do, I settled like silt in a pond, and these poems help me blow shit up again as I remember and redact and fake the words into remembrances/poems both real and imagined. The persona in these poems is a complex motherfucker, or thinks of himself that way. It's a good thing he's got a low-IQ translator like me.
Abandonment
I watched Uncle Walt pull a fake tittie
out of his inner flannel shirt,
present it to my father like a gift
he ought to bow and scrape for.
Dad laughed and pulled at his beer,
I went off to watch the older kids
fucking behind the old milk house
on the hay left over from years
and years of farming but the farm
had been abandoned—plows still set
in the high grass beside the stone wall,
bob-wire stuck in gray old fence posts
while my brother pumped at a red-haired
girl who threw her head back like a horse
straining at a bit only she could feel,
his white cheeks glistening with sweat.
Farm gone, girl gone, Uncle Walt gone
brother/dad unreachable for reasons known
and unknown; I look back through time
and see myself touching myself,
eight years old, consumed by guilt and fire.
How One Word Connotes a Star
Great White sang something about traveling
across your state line. You'd recently
demilitarized your zone with a razor. The idea
had some appeal. Your sunflashed dad and his short-
barreled shotgun proved us too young. I slipped
my cold hand hipward and he busted out the door
in sweatpants and a camo jacket to say
Nice night kids. Lookit that moon!
Hitched his pants skyward and coughed.
I returned my hand to your safe shoulder.
He went to bed dog-howling nervous;
the bedroom light stayed on all week.
In the night sky your navel supernovaed
to the rhythm of my probing tongue
and flared like cinnamon in my mouth.
We lit out for a galaxy of trembling we
worked all night to reach it while the stars
tittered behind their stone-white hands.
I dig these. I'm still trying to put a finger on what it is in your poetry that rings true for me as a reader. I'm beginning to think it's the concreteness of it, the slab-like consistency rocking out with phrase after insightful phrase.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the kind words. I'm a fiction writer compelled to write poems--very odd feeling, that is. Sometimes I think all I have to offer in a poem are concrete details.
ReplyDeleteI think that the more concrete detalis there is in a poem the more such poem has to do with metaphor as a whole
ReplyDelete