“Brush your teeth with a salt-warped toothbrush dipped in lukewarm water that has been sitting in copper pipes a long while. Follow those pipes, see how they make a glittering maze all their own. ”
Close up, / we see his resignation,
the world-weary way / he peels
himself out of his indentation
like a man long acquainted / with disaster...
She dropped the knife, which (in a poem) might drop silently out of the picture, having done its time in the one line that needs a honed edge. Here we can let it drop to the tiled floor, let it clatter like a spun quarter hula-dancing ever faster while she drops to her knees, stunned by a vision of Mary Magdalene rippling in the bath water...
razor fetish Barbie is the trash faerie
blackened with wire corona and tin can wings...
She could not believe that something so fundamental as a phone could really and truly be dead. “You wore it out,” my father told her. “You talked on it so much that it died of exaustean. Of eaus er exaustism. Was gassed with exhaust.”
When the world calms : magnetic pulse across the nose : the asses of lightening bugs take sickly green and make it radiant...
You should have checked with me.
It’s your turn to do the dishes.
You do it like it’s a big chore.
Tell me if you’re going.
Martha arrives with Sharon, her Chief of Operations and dear dear friend. A single round of sake and Martha whispers in her husky oh so Connecticut voice that she’s in love with a married man who lives in London. You can relate, being married to a man you don’t love and having visited London.
The person you are paired with concurs, even though now that you look around you can’t find them—apparently, you are no longer paired. You will recall them fondly, and associate them with the complicated mechanism of touch...
Tears. This, us, the audience too, would be sold at auction for millions within the year if the sausage kept flying and kept plowing on towards the end, the full five minutes without falling. As advertised. Soon. If we continued on to the summit. Damien Hirst: eat your gold-plated skull out.
She stroked the cards with her fingers; she tapped them like her ritual timpani drums. The light from the window barely penetrated the interior. I couldn’t see the cards. But she laid them out. And she played me.
4. Small, nocturnal creatures that attack fabric or wood. 5. One who mouths. 6. A window with no glass. 7. A piece of raw story, with a sprig of parsley on top. 8. To wear a knife...
Sing, sing, its bronze plumage bared for the first audience that will listen. Be it trees. Be it reed beds. Be it wind through the moorlands which it has been mimicking. It is a mutable thing...
The Lady of the afternoon shades remains
caustically unembarrassed and
better on intemperate days,
blinded in summer in winter in spring
she listens to her heart shivering
pop goes the eschatological cherry...
We use other words for what we mean, and we weaponize the alphabet in both our languages. I’ve come here just to make you try to get rid of me again. I’ve come to make these people cry...
...all I do is usher her into and out of
a little cloud of smoke
trying not to rupture its delicate ringlets...
...isaid/ itfeelslike/ speedingdownonewaystreets/ nodirection/ nostoplights/ and/ &/
andthecarsdonthavebrakes/
doesnothavebrakes/
imeanmyheartdoesnthavebreaks/
imeanicantbreathe/
icantsee/...
Some believe it absorbs
all negative energy, can attack
demons, ghosts, black magic. Use it to clean
your aura...
I know enough discarded parts, landfills of hips and thighs enough
to call it contagious, to lose the vision of women, communities of fleshy girls with bony hearts, bony girls with fleshy hearts, enough to blanket the world twice...
From here they look like one set of variables in a three-part algebra problem—a point of departure, a destination, the distance between. Read closely; parse the givens; set a clock ticking...
Hi, I'm serpentine & will be eaten in two weeks. I've exploited
these simpletons since I was evergreen & now I think I'm ripe
enough...
Like Whitman listening to Kraftwerk, Michael J. Wilson’s A Child of Storm fuses the incandescent pulse of the forest with vivid projections of the life of Nikola Tesla. These currents turn together, a luminous aurora of sap, electricity, biography, and ecology in this profound collection of poems.
A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be unfolds on the unruly, mixed-race, queer-sexed margins of a conservative 1930s Southern town.
"Assembled from soundbites, lists, landscapes, and found objects, Craig Foltz’s writing chases the day to day lives of our contemporaries down absurdist avenues..."
"According to poet, essayist, and collagist Uche Nduka, 'This splendid poet's concerns are aesthetically laid bare here—politics, love, philosophy, autobiography, homage. His commitment to his art manifests in chiseled language, brilliant imagery, varied forms, questions, affirmations, heartfelt rebellion...'"
"'I know nothing about death, absolutely nothing,' asserts the narrator of this inventive autobiographical novel. Yet he can't stop thinking about it..."
The essence of a miscellany of diverse things is not merely to catalog a wunderkammer of everyday objects, but moreover to hold up a double mirror: one to reveal the interior lives of objects, and another to reflect the depths of their creators and owners.
