Archive

                                                                                                    “7°F last night. Can’t stop singing Johnny Shines:
                                                                                                    ‘So cold in Vietnam, words don’t sound the same.’”
                                                                                                    —Jake Adam York, Twitter, December 10, 2012

Last Night’s Dream was the same as any other:
salt filling the room crystalized and brackish. You
appeared with a keyboard, predicting your own
death: the words might never sound the same
the words might never even sound/ and yesterday
the murder ballads of the evening shifted before
sleep. A poet in a green suit says cannibal/ heard carnival:
the horse-shift of carousels gone dark. We are always
hearing what we want to and always hearing what
we don’t/don’t have the time to correct wrong/
simply the ear demanding its own certainty
like a god. Today I dream of a tragic green
suit’s misfit, the night’s snapping cold, an illness
we chase like a toy/ its own permanent elegy.

You say there is nothing as beautiful as                   the dry cracking,
the callus of a hard day’s work.                                       My hands speak back through

creases, the folds you bury your face in.                  Every sound
pressuring flesh like a magnet,                                        breaking skin, snapping

a rib that no longer carries                                                 current. I dive to

beat                                                                                                        myself at the bottom. I comb
my hair strands                                                                            with useful fingers. Anguilliform means

resembling an eel—                                                                  nothing beautiful—
this slimy new ocean, this                                                  dark fertile magic, the scaleless serpent

air is all                                                                                               wrong here.