in her serrated scale thigh
The man with arcbent weapon
probability lurking epidemic
outer grass skirts of her
future and land past
all her out element day
5
Surrender to rhythm
her mother engendered
is tantamount to death
but that for rhythm is a sliver
of the bare meaning we on earth
get to planet around the bend
Meredith relented for heartbeat
hymn after noon meal regulation
meant and drumsplay unstrung
undermanaged multiple reconstitutions
Love what you will lose as well
as you would if you would not
lose and again what you will
not watch wash out of the tide
or from with by
Terror shrank
in the deep cold red depths
of the hopeless few in HamletMart
the earliest of virtual residence
coastal malls replete with surfing
untoppable and for modern living
accessorized manners of being
in the aqualung capacity era
Capable Meredith
She had hardened she had atrophied
into some success by loving and giving
what she wanted to keep for herself
to a new legsman of the times
She earned
She survived as only those
seeds displaced into husk
unwelcome even having fallen
so close to the kelp forest
O let me get through this
and I promise after I will
be a better listener
Thunder brought silver
coins and alphabets
Competition retail ladies
around the shop helped out
on busy rental leisure stretches
the wheelchair only so agile
as the vacuity of drywalkers
in the atmosphere near it
only so free as lonely apropos
6
Dragons clittered the sand
dancing on pins and where
the nails scurried so there
were etched the eventualities
of the slaughter of a great
little love gone to the surf
and skate shops on the warlock
fringe of the galaxy along
the stitches and sea shelves
of which lust tongued
Meredith’s marine which lust
7
A kind of loneliness
it only had itself to cull from
and everything else
Cardiac cadences headed earthward
Broad backed irreverence assured
The stars still miniscule
in past small achievements
in past hella scopes
8
Meredith better adventuress
Shock boundary patrol inheritance
Dare to keep kids off
rhythm method
Let whatever thread
bare semblance of any pattern
in the tides succumb frontal
to the sliverfingers of detail
clamming through the sand
Ozzie’s hands on her
hourglass with fin figure
I quake to the cartilage she thought
I need to migravigate all out
from the swell clutches of his touch
Little did the not yet left know
the subzero grammar in his touch
9
Southern California May
is graceful mild estuary ebb
petals in the breezes
Steady as a rock garden face
crammed with eyes between lovers
Ozzie glinted exotic
conquest in the ballistic minutes
after smooth beautiful sex
Sweat off his six pack shot
back at thrilled Meredith her own
image shimmer no axis replication
One half self exile
and one tuck legged animation
of need is company
but throw in a god cog
you have at best a crowd
of cowards in the sack
Her video cubicle boss
thought out loud how unprofessional
loving a customer was of her
She flapped spun and laughed
all the one way to the well being
deposit box in the arduous heart
of the most aggressive renter
Lovideo had ever been pleased
to serve to you thank you very much
It was time for no more sensational
ism favors
She savored the taste of land
in the flavor of his skin
She knew something of the ecstasy
of every thing that ever was a body
She would not unclamp
her eyes in the bath
for months before the end
She would not dare a gull
to charge in the imagination
for fear of its finding some
incoming reason in its imprinting
to bite her nether like Ozzie would
not stop once
Her favorite lengths of her
before became unbearing
Something of the ecstasy
of every thing Meredith and Ozzie
shared in seven years came again
and again uncouth
Hydrodermic seafill
up from below on the globe
crashed upon the battered strand
border his perspiring skin
her arid scales after the orgasms
and yet more isms
Immigration stranglehold enforcement
officer overdoing it was lax
Other people landed from other lands
Grim pills came ashore
the skiff of fools pacific
Under photon shock
the very palest face assuming
reproduction will buttress
after a few generations
Ozzie’s tan only half the story
The unending incomplete the other
needed to keep a victim’s cap fitted
and on and halfcocked in order
to understand the world owed Ozzie
something made sense to him
Half the battle keep being
no matter what Meredith
The story changes
but you can stop reading
One always loses in letters the battle
10
It was the kind of Cali burnball sun
that even the shadow side
of you goes gilded
Where it can be good to be
what the sun don’t shine
Under each thing the near
sense of its searing somewhere above
Meredith loved from the loins
on down to the most spacious
abstracted gargoyle nasty
The unfortunate find that making up
again and again makes up somewhat
You knock the dust beneath
my scales reoceanified
You rock my garden
Give me legs that I might stumble
Double my digits
Go from me please Ozzie
My roots are your food
The good I might do
your world loses excruciating
fuel to your guru mood
So she was scripted
Dolphin calls local echoed
in bird and bad brake lines
School of safe shallows
where no one benefits from
reader power institution
Love some nights she lapped
him like cruel gruel
Most though
network nerve invigorator cued
such music through her underness
it felt like prayer should
but did not to Meredith
Or not most though
11
Ozzie’s tank top read
Life’s too short to fall in love
with thankless women
He’d eat ice cream dogs and his
hardline figure only pulled tauter
Like a fork he hurled javelin filth
at holy roller bladers
May your higher power seethe
up the ten foot pole I’d scale for a chance
to shake the traitor’s hand that left
your celibate savior double crossed
Meredith blushed
like cloudswept coral
Boardwalk hot brown
hurricane gauntlet
under barometric brooding
Ozzie wheeled her to a stop
so suddenly she tossed nearly out
of her aluminum hulk’s clutches
Meredith landed both feet
flat to the boards
Pain crossfaded into
the Instamatic memory of legs
she had never had
One hundred thousand dendrites fired
at once
Ozzie squawked
Her head fell forward some
of her seeing almost seeing legs
crossed the rest aflutter of metal
racks and baseball hat shaped
hats with writing gone
To each her narcoleptic heyday
O huffed and stood there
eyeing other women reading
merchandise for something to say
to strangers later on
Some love differently
Some upchute takers and others
no back access passers
He licked his pallid lips
as Meredith came to
He licked until he saw she saw
12
Succeedingly nervous encounter
with sleep and or sacristy
Greater means of living may not
yet carouse the oceanic depths
subhydro crustacean style
of incremental liberating
Persantine for a breaking heart
Isordil for a breaking heart
Lanoxin for eight months ten days
Lasix for a breaking heart
Ziroxalyn for a breaking heart
and baby aspirin banquets
Somewhere somebody is meat
packing hands attached to arms
reduction fearing arms
Reduction lighting atmospheres
another day older indebted
13
Epilogarithmic ever after possibilities
flood Meredith’s brain spaces
This is freedom too
Broken glass chew alchematic husband
Her face ready to be garden again
obsidian cut of unlit bone resolve
lava rock chalk scribble jigging
under the sea green over
chalcedony luster of her eyes
and a future that never slams
shut into one’s face but once
Ozzie’s interactive bank
of murderous declension
He must have wanted her
dead the stop action blossoms
he planted in only the already
weak departments in her head
The reinforced smartbeam
scaffold of an underwater life
her lost night her element
she kept as secret ballast
Everywhere she golden glares
at the world was manywing
necessary motion of all matter
to an absolute deep freeze
near Kelvin zero
God is the imperfection
of brine and love smears
of an unreachable inside
All other than before
her fin like a bird
***
Jason Kirk is an award-winning poet and editor, and the author of THE OTHER WHITES IN SOUTH AFRICA, REVERB, and most recently, a chapbook entitled A FABULOUS HAG IN PURPLE ON THE MOOR (Bitterzoet Press). The recipient of an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Michigan, his writing awards include Hopwood Major and Minor Poetry Prizes, the Helen S. and John Wagner Prize, the Michael R. Gutterman Award, and the June Rose Colby and Roy W. Cowden Memorial Fellowships. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Twitter: @brasswax Facebook: /jasonkirkbooks Goodreads: /brasswax
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