Chapbook - Erasure

The final products. I'm thinking about scanning the erasure in and PDFing the chapbook over break.

Trace

I.

I took the Bart yesterday and thought of you

riding bareback with the balm in the hand. He’s

mad, and yes, he’s

my brother mispronounced Rimbaud and Baudelaire

with little blue green strings in the sheets.

Call me shirtless, juggling

oranges in the kitchen is

Friday afternoon is getting things wrong is

stick your fingers down

my throat I don’t know, and you,

you look like a guitar too, but one made by Picasso. Oh think

you’re a piece of cake, huh?

They’re running down

across the water, watch for this.

II.

Then I became greedy there aren’t any

crab cakes in this painting the fury

fixation of do I dare disturb the universe? Well

I’m sitting like this, places get crowded

French stains on the pillows let it seep, won’t you let it

late for work. Here another

you down throwing countries,

get those bruises somewhere. Revival

the fittest orchid projects, imagine this please:

The Blue Boy watching, his Mother is afraid

she’s full of charm. Perfect train length

rip of the Renaissance Man,

bowed from the world

most everybody laughs now.

III.

Your reaction to a limp I kept

plastic on the pulse, you give yourself

goose bumps. Less details

be satisfied,

the next day, untouched. He takes lives,

splitting I’m getting lost in

insulting memory loss at the

aquarium pressed into the palm, bruise is

advice on my private life. A cross made of palm fronds

ask me to come home, you have to take off

your clothes scare beluga whales, illusion

how strange are you? I thought about

the ocean around you, instead people fell,

forced out by the heat.

IV.

Your metallic sheen of gold you had to

walk into when I only speak while you’re sleeping,

open up the foliage, nothing is fabulous

anymore than this slight slip. Down in

the rows pulse hydrangeas, keeping up

is irritated skin, is sore throat

something you feel guilty for? Talking in

cursive, see the era

a spruce of over-analysis. Even now

as they call you through white fences, bare

eagerness of gravitation

taut voice in motion, I ask you. Measure

your face through an automatic writer, witness

this time in the garden.

Parataxis

legs like flamingos

but worse, they’re as good as real

now who’s charming who

tripping down staircases

total gratification

of seeing our feet under the stalls

she remained an aristocrat

humid and sopping in there

even with the bathing suit

what do those ladies smell like

bleeding ulcers in a gown

watch them stagger

into the everyday

decorative and thrusting

greased-stained cotton

through a pinhole

teasing and quiet

the two have to meet

waiting in the same line

a mutual pretending of the familiar

when the projector fell in love

she believes it, uninterested

he imagined unzipping a fleece jacket

pulling arm rests apart

it is that physical

trapped against an extra limb

following, exhausted

red tinges the cushion

a kind of hieroglyphic, skin

he was too bare-chested

rising from the kitchen floor

girls and wild horses

boys and wild horses

get stuck in swamps

during the time tile cracks

mold can multiply

as conversation promises

there the great adventure

not the same

dull and caked

an outline disappears

calls it the slopping of mud

clumps of hair in the drain

a small indication

christmas happened

iron traps

tease out the danger

of the living room as it dims

there is still a part in the pond

that his youth exists

stark and pulsating against the walls

no one could see straight

a sliver on the inner thighs

was too much for the internal hush

she crushes with her thumb

spitting and laughing

Some parataxis sonnets I wrote earlier this semester.

I stood at the bow with my feet sopping in dirty socks. I could see the bioluminescence of dinoflagellates beneath the dark water. It made me think about red tide. Remember those seals that got sick and washed up on shore? How the toxins affected their brains? I barely knew you then.

I had been walking around the deck because I was afraid to pee, the wind cutting through my thin cotton pajamas. This trip was better than the one where we had to pretend we lived during the time of Two Years Before the Mast aboard the remastered Pilgrim. Max didn’t cry this time because the First Mate was too mean (rather, realistic).

A chaperone came up behind me and told me I should be in the cabin, that we were snorkeling tomorrow.  I watched a seal chasing a group of squid. Didn’t squid feed on the dinoflagellates a few steps later in the food chain? I went back to bed, urine dripping off the side of the vinyl coated cot.

More work from my Killer Dana chapbook.