Fifty-eight percent of the men and women at whom you smile while grocery shopping say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.” Fifty-seven percent of the men and women who hold a restaurant door open for you say harsh interrogation techniques can provide information that can prevent terrorist attacks. Army Field Manual 34-52 Chapter 1 reads: “Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.” And yet.
Spring 2017 Season
Work from the Spring 2017 Season of concīs
Silo
the year I spent eating
eyelashes suckling
a hangover hippocampus
slamming on & off like a stagelight
I couldn’t stop watching
that trashbag caught in a tree
pray for a break in the blight
how many people won’t
speak to you now
there was a silo I knew
that burnt down and what remained
was a cement ring this
is autopsy membrane
fixation in all my territory
I find so little tender
One Saturday Afternoon
I watched my mother
(Who had grown
All of her fingernails
Very long) choose
Not to dust or clean
The house that day
Instead she polished
Each pointy oval tip
A bright candy pink
Twice over then added
A translucent topcoat
And let them air-dry
While she eased back
Ignoring everything:
The kitchen, my father,
Even me, and leisured
To read Prisoner of Desire
On our old green sofa.
Perverted Karma
My mother passed down
your 18 carat pinky ring.
An heirloom showpiece.
Thick-built manly thing
boasting a square-cut garnet
that crowned dead center.
But I sold the gold
to an old fogey
at a curio shop.
He pressed and pushed
his thumb clean through
the rear end
until the gem broke free.
Then dropped
your popped cherry
in my palm for keeps.
Anagrammed Variations of the American Dream
A ram cairned me
In a crammed era [where]
Cameramen raid
A dire cameraman [or]
Arid cameramen
[Becoming]
A creamed airman [or]
A carmine dream
A minced ram ear
[a] maniac rearmed
As freedom turns into a dorm fee
Democracy to a car comedy, and
Human rights to harming huts
VIII/XI/MMXVI
Krishnamurti said when the one you love goes, a part of you follows. Typewritten gnats spill greasy birdseed tunnels. For a moment there are two worlds. Spring presses toward me through glass; my garden hallway, a clutter of moths in milky silt. Crocus unpin your breastbone. In all eventual acts, humans compose ghost.
Side Arrangements
Carbon, what’s left after water
vapor’s risen along with smoke,
the fire’s remainder a blackness
of orphaned atoms. Carbon, chains
wound up inside us, thirsts and murders
its side arrangements, braided fuse
igniting the present’s spark-light
in the black of was and will be. Carbon,
footprint of our fumbling, our cutting
down our origin’s columns
to stoke a stone hearth. And a diamond—
hard dry tear of still here,
a long-ago life pressed pure
in the dark under a forest, pick-axed
by a hard-worked dark-skinned miner—
you’ll wear it, held by a few silver
prongs to a silver wire to ring
your thin slow-burning finger.
The Little Match Girl
A single match isn’t worth shit
and she knows it. Is everyone
really ignoring her or is she
just feeling sorry for herself?
You can’t tell me she goes
unnoticed: a girl on the boulevard
half dressed. Someone out here
is into that kind of thing, but
what advice do we have for her,
ladies? What about fair trade
and quiet acquiescence?
Think Cinderella, Snow White
or any number of dolls who held
their wares aloft like flaming cakes.
Call it a modern day fairy tale:
A girl on a street corner,
a couple of matches to her name,
a holy host of magazines plying
her with pithy asides and makeup
application tricks: You, too, can have
this couch, this fire, this tree, this man,
all you have to do is freeze.
Audio Recordings of Doomed Airliners
What I’m afraid of, because the conquered broadcast their panic and their endless wild as a quarantine of forests. The theory is that sometimes it rains when she died and sometimes it doesn’t, that we invented ourselves from sheer want or stumbled into someone else’s miracle, and every person thrown around your body is a dream and every dream is a bridge and every bridge is a god and every god an invention and a beached planet co-existing and co-exiting.
In the Broken Down House
Decisive, divisive, deceptive,
the lack of room to breathe
fully, what context blooms
to meaning, the walls only fogged
remembrance. Rain spokes
from trees, clops on roof,
tinks at window. Mold stink sifts
from sills and rotting porch.
Bone swallow, blue hollow.
Place subtracted.
Time excised.