climbs a white aisle in the fat
then up the milky glare-drawn
highlight of her hair. “Oh where
oh where,” sings the TV
perched against a windowsill
behind her. Scuffed tupperware
from which to buy puce
livers smooth as species
gradually evolved to manage
sea. Nothing catches on thee
who have no lip nor snare
nor snag. My little dog is fear,
his leash, ennui. A color
like a memory of red.
A kid poked at the edge
of the white hen rustling
through the mesh whose throat
a hand then texting
later snipped with scissors.
That woman’s sleeping.
What body does her dream
give the groan of a lathe
the worksite’s starting up? Once
the beige-pink greasy slab of chicken
on my plate was “Actually,”
he corrected, “swan.” Looking
then was like surveying
some slick face the morning’s
butchered from a heady
absence kissed in the dark.
To be such duped bulk
hung from the hook of the mouth
with our ears cut short and
our hair cut long and the sly
flesh laundering your every cell
from cell like stolen bills. I bit his arm
so hard one time my teeth
got red. I peeled the band-aid
from my finger and discovered
where my skin had been
a damp white band, death’s
wedding ring. Dreamt again
of getting pestled down by thought
until I’m just a fine grain
sifted through your skin. Nor clasp
nor grip, no purchase on. Settling
inside you I could there
at last see nothing. The land
here’s full. A grave costs
more than a lease on a flat
and a body’s legally evicted after
twenty years when the plot
can sell again. Government
handouts feed the living willing
to be shipped offshore.
From city-sponsored vessels
passengers throw ashes at the bride
the ocean is and back on land
it’s beachgoers in “facekinis,” lycra
ski masks to preserve their skin
so from a boat coming in
you’d think the sand
was mobbed with robbers
who suddenly lay down midheist.
KNOTWORK
Somewhere can we not say “if, then.”
Somewhere can we not think “first, second.”
Line loose on the wind
that turns it and it curves.
That twists it into things
of this world. For example
this vine called “empty-hearted
vegetable” in a green tangle
on the vendor’s table. Crisp spines
of spinach and the amaranth’s magenta tips
alongside heaped sprouts, every white arc
ending on a moth-green seed.
The vendor bunches scallions
under orange rubber bands.
A woman knocks on each
watermelon to hear within the sound
how it will taste. Somewhere
you can feel the sinuous shape
of the future start to be perceptible
as leaning toward the pane
there stroked my cheek
a spider silk I hadn’t seen before.
“The hollower the echo is,” she says,
“the sweeter.” Soft red encircled
by a dark green globe. Here
across the earth from home
I’m twelve hours deeper into time
but further outside, stranger
to the thoughts I thought
I knew. The body’s pulse I understood
in numbers I have learned
to understand as texture
blood can thread
between its vessels. A needle
pierced behind the neck released
an old pain from the heart. A legend
ties red thread around the ankles
of an infant and the person he or she
will one day marry. White shoots
sent down through the dark
by grass I lay in as a child. Is the deepest
root of a plant the plant that grows
on the Earth’s other side? The legend goes
the child shown the life he’d lead
was so disgusted by the sight, he threw
a rock at her. If it were only hollow,
the future, that we might enter it
untouched, unstitched from what
we’ve done before, but it’s
not like that. Not destiny
but neither is it chance
since chance ignores the rigging
winding through experience
ornate as knotwork
tying nothing to depict
at every scale (from cell-phone charm
to wall hanging) the intricate charade
of human will. An art
in practice now for twenty
centuries. Red cord twisting
back on itself. The world
a slipknot closing
on the senses. It brushed my face.
I touch my wrist. What pulls
the line through me? A floating
pulse, a flooding pulse, a hollow pulse,
firm pulse, a knotted pulse, a wiry,
rolling, superficial, leathery,
a scattered, silken thread through water,
empty, slippery, hesitant. The story goes
two decades later, the boy weds
a beautiful girl he loves
who always wears a flower
on her forehead. Inkling
in the vein like footfall on the other face
of the world, the force that through
the green fuse drives the wire. “Why
do you wear that flower
on your forehead?” “I can’t show
my forehead.” Of course you know
the end but what is it you know
knowing that? “Why can’t you?”
“I can’t tell.” “Tell me, you’re bound
to me now.” “All right. When I was still small
someone threw a rock at my forehead.” Not chance
but neither is it choice, this wiring that isn’t
will or love or need or sense, the feel
of things starting.
And the Bow Shall Be in the Cloud
Michael Ives
routine hub-tones figure in a scatter
drum at a slight torque to religion
house of contrary jade
burning in the mountain’s phoneme
an event consists of a mirror and a
stork holding an egg upright in its bill
reinvents home
*
marble can make eyes pressed into
that serious weather of rocks
left scarred by their attractor
while our delicate veins forged in Jeta Forest
push a pavilion full of bulls
toward the flower’s center filters out
even distances want their now
*
when I take the coral reef out for a drive
whose tourist attraction smears into
birds falling out of the flight path
dint cost me a Jungian shadow
O anti-aging truck locked in reverse be the food
when I catch my bearing witness fucking a cache of knives
but only once
*
a lion drinks from the myth of the hammer
and the sky opens out into itself
another sacred pause in the sacred chaos
making stone / back in five
life isn’t your dad’s Texas
not that it matters
if the storm’s buried in a / in a frost of bones
*
to hear immortal birds
singing near the waterfall
a privilege of elite power
but they’ll tear you
from your throne of obsidian
like you were a vein in a mine
if you don’t die when they tell you
*
should certain forms of detachment
reflect a setting sun
with bone inlay at the eyes and dreams
but what did they see in their gaze
those people from a cloned before
gathering both in and near the appearances
the ones refitting the vision cog / ?
*
dark money influence at the think tank
a flux in the reconciliation
of polished granite and warning sirens
frames the entrance
to every merger
there is a season
gumming the tape head
*
as to using screw braces
to still a vibrating conversion riff
I’d go instead for a clutch reverser
behind the secondary water chimp
ack / ! / sorry / more mechanization
seems like an arbitrary solution
to what / ?
*
those crocodile-headed days
arranged in a sex-wreath
round the baby shower
their lives spent brooding
over the downed Blackhawk
if you’ve got wings
fly the hell out of there
*
surceases never wonder
but front a vibe syndicate
forging the absolute
in a diagram of phenomena
as still as constant motion
as overt as a hidden
non-dimension-less-ness
*
before an afterlife
it swaddled me in its frequency
many Hz above the sweep
of my previous life
the one before that become a stir of rags
around the ankles of another
I shall learn to hear in yet another
*
air dynasts take their meals
in a silence of three suns
embassage many months from home
yet the palace walls taper toward a war
visible under the viceroy’s half-opened robe
and the funerary urn at the inter-pulse
full of kingdom
*
under the sky horse at its zenith
dynasts reduced to sand
and fragrant wood
growing through the openwork
moon tethered over bridge
as from the search for a glazed jar
a system of highways emerges
*
and heaven looks once again like a shark attack
to the girl I want to be
when I’m exactly this distance from you
late grove of blossoms / one Jessica Savitch
tackling the problem of surface area
along an end-folded Villa Lobos bottle
twisting on its axis at the speed of sky
*
for an albatross has no need of time zones
as are the names of the letters
the vestal virgins of the names
afternoon a squirrel’s dark eye
opens onto the fippled conch of dawn
sluiced at soft diagonals
to your sense machine
*
the gradual opening of animal flesh
to a generalized tool power
over time reveals physical action
to have been an ur-robotics
in conspiracy with the speech of rooms
which flows without obstruction
through the walls of human speech
*
the head of the pope is a plot twist a portal
of Chartres is the stoma in a leaf a bestiary
a tunnel to the leopard’s banquet a year
the monocerous turning in its sleep symbol
an echo in front of its source blood
the youngest child of ocean Christ
a fold of drapery if
*
as soon as you’re sure the
it’s there hook into the
echo plex behind the
zero hour’s wizard I’ve seen the
invisible forms passing through the
my vision is exactly the
watching invisible forms pass through the
*
ask me how I know what’s in the tabernacle
salt the opposition’s morning
lube your inner Ibiza
pet it and breathe
tell her you haven’t been outside in a year
introduce fetters
appropriate the oceans
*
before we approach the glory
we dump the organs
before we void the plenty
we meat the air
posit the house / but burn the room
synthesize the manga load
*
guilt cuff having deactivated itself
within Mangelsdorff range
where all the sidemen are named Lloyd
at a rate of three an hour
in observance of late privileges
given over to advents and infancies
but I was coming around from the other side
*
to explain how the original prayer
recaptured in a cold sophistication
had presaged the art of trench digging
into an impermanence forever
which to approach from below
thickens a vertical ocean of stone
and on it goes and
*
stacked schemes in the sense of
it comes flooding back to you
shards of a second Los Angeles
in desert with Moses and his silent hench
same as per the squeeze fix
draining from centers of questionable tension
all the old lymph
*
there’s trouble in the VX tower
crypto-synchronization of opaque speech / :
burning clay syndrome all over again
thus wishing 2 introduce
Repurposed Redaction of the Primary Telos
as if it were mounted
on small adjustable road trips
*
directly across the street
from a thinking such as haunts Her
here in the throat of anger
feeds Her children toward a covenant
of faux Ezekiels at the center of the storm
state pontoons will tilt
but the roof of malachite remains singular
*
to have pulled another “Sierra Club”
while She who authorized the naked pics
I had taken as a species of bath salts
afterwards compelled for the sake of the perceiver
to grind Her oblique garden
into an unregistered level
of unicorn
*
remarkable nonetheless for its ( )
will not broach queries having to do with ( )
flows yet wrestles itself into an ( )
adversary the better to disturb my ( )
whose blood sphinx tied to ( )
waits to catch when it falls from ( )
restless brilliance is killing ( )
*
or storm door into mood ox
uncertain as to weather
I’m still a standing member of society
sewed my wings back into
dank was their Sabbath
blind starting out toward what avails
appearances the gill in the being
*
back in the day when mothers were
moved backwards and forwards
over the harrowing cradles
by an endless chain of commands
issuing from the central shaft
when a snow-monkey wardrobe
made the presidents laugh
*
endless mille-feuille of monetized sleeving
one’s Mylar brainpan cradles the
performs a unification of
strip mall under morpho-
sex-o-tic cloudscape euphoria with
have you learned nothing / ?
endless gorgeous convexity of nothing / ?
*
its torso as permeable
and closed at either end with openings
their calendar day ran unnoticed
along the bottom of a master codex
truer than the tale it told
of standardized children and the Jones
for a flame-cooled orthodoxy
*
if astonishing sequences of fine movement
rippling across the planes of the face
means to possess a face
having fixed early on in its lineaments
enormous quantities of atmospheric anxiety
which to witness rescues the Other
from what His inherent Nixon deems
*
during a five-minute gene morph
should it wander toward the blurred edge
of the target algorithm
is often refed through several more molts
till override kicks in