Rag (an excerpt)

In crayon drawings


Some persons lie buried in fire and some have been suspended in a wave


Rain withdraws its praise


I'm unable to rest, her hunger crying through a vent


I wanted to unzip her coat, to slide a hand


Under the body of a car


But I was never one to fix a machine. Elsewhere the nest of the wasp


Other, the birch-bark and lichen


The townhouses stunned by foreclosure


The bubbling well in the mall


Now are we wanting plaster surrogates


To gather nightly in our halls?




"Like a maelstrom with a notch"


This world can dizzy even a womb


And mine is just a bit of breathing


A bit of breathing through a line


Not because I'm humble, because I'm made


Made to be humiliated and to be adored


I've never until now sensed two terms


To stand closer together than these




To gather nightly in our erosions


Our data bases our platforms our diagrams


If that's how you want to think about it


If that's how you want to think about it


In the blue dusted dawn of a feast day


I'm certain to dissolve in the fever


Of what pours from your skull, o clarion sun





From Rag (Omnidawn Publishing, 2014). All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.