by Alex Lemon
axe cracking the bathroom door. Bleached radio
piercing the sun with a tune I’ll never remember
6
Touch the photo that peels clothes. Hunger for it like bare
feet
On sun-slivered pavement, cricket legs longing for rubs
Slip me into that train-track bed, torsos weaving
Wicked & blue. City of fence-rust, streetlights bulling for life
Lopsided with fog, what must passengers think staring
down dawn?
Bodies arched into something only sewers can name
Orchard of polished ghosts, flesh pimpled
with rain
Teeming wordless & terrible, grief dangles
from concrete fruit
7
My yard is frail with crushed cans, flat-sailed rubbers
It is the felled redbreast’s grass-jawed grave
Bottle caps like diamonds buried in a finger-box of ribs
Jigsaw morning, the branch hisses mud
Trodden & cubist. Too much gesso & not enough light
Paint my nothing portrait, use amphetamines
Paint the gift of the neon wasp
It is the year of the dismembered horse
Bury me with bone-dice instead of eyes
Juke Joint
I’d strip, peel myself to show you
the jukebox of hearts. Still,
you’d frown, say that’s nothing—
a foot pressed into river mud,
movie dialogue edited for TV
where the bad guy turns cotton
candy. Boxer-veins streaking
his forehead, he aims the pistol,
shucks, he says, mouth twisted
into fuck. Don’t stop listening,
it’s a train chugging runaway
on ecstasy. Overflowing fishbowl
or uncovered cage, you’d ask,
ear to my ribs like a doctor.
You’d point everywhere,
confused until I tell you,
I am hi-fi, all of me is surround
sound. I snap fingers & the world
is xylophones. Feel my wrist,
it is a coda dragging its feet. I click
my teeth like cymbals. Hold
your hand to my chest, I’ll baptize you
in the river. But we have to start
now. Here—take off my belt.
A Country Mile of Soft
Do it, the river wept
this morning. No one will
know. I burned
the autographs.
Licked crayon-wax
from my fingers
to celebrate waking.
I wallpapered nude
so when I flipped
into the down-dog,
I became the jumping
bean’s slow cousin.
This is the New West.
The la-la in sagebrush,
a magic-strummed scenery.
Last night was guns & confetti,
an elephant-sized centrifuge & we
were spic & span, tongued safe & clean.
Happiness
does not keep him from feeling
the woman within kick and claw.
His habits are not his alone.
Behind the sunglasses’ missing lens,
an eye blinks sunburnt. He reaches
with perfect manners, right arm
stealing tomatoes from the salad.
Left sleeve sewn to his side, he is spill-proof,
enjoys tart wine in chiming glass.
Locked away, a shoe befriends half a scissor,
collects pecks from a lonesome lovebird.
A pant sleeve pinned above the knee,
he looks as if he’s been jumping
one-legged in floodwater, saving
only one of the twins. He wears
the up-all-night face of singles tennis,
orders individual knives from infomercials.
One sock. One nostril. One glove. One arm.
Wave to him when he holds nothing.
At happy hour watch him handle the two for one.
Step Up
Welcome to the carnival
of misfortune, drunks singing
in sweat-thick air. Howling
like locusts, they point at stars,
map the never coming home.
Believe me when I tell you
I’ve stolen everything.
Have a goldfish, I am yearning
to share the moon. Billiard balls clack
& cars groan away. Eight-ball,
side pocket & the ghost-ring
doorbell. Under streetlights,
touch is pyrotechnic Braille.
The blues are crumbling—fiddle,
hawkweed & horn. Blow that
trumpet, baby, use my spit.
Graffiti
i.
We litany the air with bottle caps, swallow
slivers of glass & rend our names. Husked-cathedrals
of horseflies purple & flash, rattle the headlights’
dusk. Skinnings from their bites piled high.
ii.
The choke-collared dog pants its music.
Coke machine, concrete, a freckled boy
shoots gumballs into the shadows.
Hold your breath & it isn’t impossible
to hear the bent-back fingers. Coat hanger—
blade-song fashioning bone.
iii.
Nostrils ringed golden, a girl snorts baggies of spray paint
& her heart freezes—confused & thick with pleasure. Pallets
for sleep, box cutters for midnight. Her lovers spit
by the dumpsters—blame luck & stroll, all switchblade lips.
iv.
The radiators burst irresistibly. Press for me packs
of ice—I will never feel. Go deeper,
the sky booms when I tear open—
the man across the way whipping dishes
from his third-story window. Bawls & begging
for more rising from the stagger-throated street.
Desideratum
—after Michael Burkard
One potato, two potato, me potato whore—
And then we bang, and I realize
This whole time, we’ve had the entire dilemma
Upside down and we must unknot
Our bodies. Already, I feel our bowel-
Heavy needs calcifying into gallstones
For it is the same failure of light
Each noon. The same squirrel, red lighting
At the window. Of course we’ll continue
To brand each other with hope
That someone might deliver us a murder
Of stone-stunned crows. That we might hold them
To our ears and hum along with the muted conversation
That is not the sea but the pitchfork
Of our happiness pushing in and out
Of oil-sopped hay. The fire alarm will still sing
And my pacemaker will still shrug—
And like good little kiddies we’ll crouch
Below our desks and cover
Each other’s groins, confident
That our heartbeats’ zings
Are just giggles in the bestiary of our desires.
We’ll pinch and grimace our flesh-
Eating pleasures, not wavering
In our mumbled odes to catastrophe
Only a teensy bit afraid to go on
The Portrait My Mother Painted from My Mug Shot
It’s old canvas—rotted wood & splinter,
paint shattered like ice. My face is a riot
of flake & line. After the accident, the cops
pistol-whipped me empty—I was chipped-
teeth, eyes like megaphones. Over me lay
a darker stillness, a sheet of red silk. She took
that blood. You can’t smell the singed hair.
She made pitch & range with pigment
& brushstroke. Face without swelling, eyes
nothing but blue. She squeezed melody
from my bruises. Hold the mug shot next
to the frame & I look like I fathered myself.
Mosquito
You want evidence of the street
fight? A gutter-grate bruise & concrete scabs—
here are nails on the tongue,
a mosaic of glass shards on my lips.
I am midnight banging against house
fire. A naked woman shaking
with the sweat of need.
An ocean of burning diamonds
beneath my roadkill, my hitchhiker
belly fills sweet. I am neon blind & kiss
too black. Dangle stars—
let me sleep hoarse-throated in the desert
under a blanket sewn from spiders.
Let me be delicate & invisible.
Kick my ribs, tug my hair.
Scream you’re gonna miss me
when I’m gone. Sing implosion
to this world where nothing is healed.
Slap me, I’ll be any kind of sinner.
3
Other Good
Anesthesia dumb, scalpel-paste
Rawing my tongue, I found
Myself starfished in sky
Spinning days. I stared into my eyelids’
Bustling magic, the black
Of my hands. Oh, how darkness
Swaggered, dealt fluorescent-blurs
& the choke of the sea. This is my everything—
Bright shuddered my cheeks,
Shadows whistled through their teeth.
Hallways thrummed & snorted,
The surgeons in my brain
Pissed with no hands.
Each day nurses wore their best
Tinfoil skirts, buried
Their caresses in my side
While pillows whispered
In spite of your scars you are tickled
To death of life.
I couldn’t understand this
Always being held. Lung-machines
Sang louder. Wave song & useless.
Midnights & swearing. Blue.
Who prayed for me—my thanks
But I can’t keep anything down.
Who knew it had nothing to do
With the wind by how light
Flickered with falling knives?
Slake
All morning I’ve watched puddles
Strain. Down the street, a hammer’s tremolo
On steel—the many ways we’ve failed.
Each time a door opens I hear a child
Choking. I wave into mirrors
And there he is—swallowing fistfuls
Of pills. In tonight’s brambled-dark,
He will kiss the first stranger he sees
With an open mouth. Shirt torn,
Desire calligraphied from lips—
No matter what we wish, he’ll shiver,
It will all jackhammer on—
Rivers yearning for the eye-blank sky as it whispers
Its tender needles, its gluttony of clouds.
Fuck You Lazy God
—for Nick Flynn
Be afraid my blissful numbskulls
You are mine Plead
Your asshole & amen but
Like blackouts I have perfect
Timing I cannot suffer for you
Lips glistening with honey
Because there is a man
Behind my ribs break dancing
His spin—glide—split
A choir of meat hooks humming
Their hi-fi heaven Now can you see
How it will end All of it slick
With the breath I lose each night
When they scalpel me open
& from the mirrored hive of my throat—
My arrows my Eros my errors
Tongue swarming bone-black—
Red-glisten-red—head
Blossoming with bruise
Mugging
I.
This is chipped-teeth, the kicked-heart,
dried blood on grandfather’s blanket.
I stretch to not be strangled
by the eleventh breath.
The body is a rotting orchard, eyes of cracked wings.
In the yard, the neighbor’s dog, all red sores
& ribs, face an instrument
of torture, looks to my window,
hollow mouth broken by light.
Nothing is permanent.
Nothing lives in this bed.
Steam floats from my shoulders like breath.
Naked, I wait to be tuned like a fallen god’s
flute. Cadence of a rattling shower
thumping my bruise. The music
of not knowing fills me, the too sweet
meat of an animal not yet dead.
II.
Is there still time for me to stop
shivering under the purple weight
of a plum, palm trembling
beneath the supermarket’s brilliance?
I wanted to pull it cleanly away,
peel flesh until I found a layer sweet
in pain. My tongue flicked tender corners,
caught rivers of blood in a pool
so deep it could fill lungs.
I still walk this poorly lit block
past midnight, vision filled
with bodies split into floods.
On these streets where black eyes expand
like nebulae, I refuse to understand
exploding shadows, how physics
carves gentle lines, a mural’s scar.
But somewhere in this gesture
I have come to realize the stupidity
of most of this world’s wants.
Recesses of the body caked
with blood, the fine art of stains.
Little Handcuffs of Air
The streetlights will blush when I sing
I felt a funeral in my brain, dragging
My car-struck dog until worms spill
From his asphalt-shorn heart
And I weep—my voice emptying
Into the twirling dark like a house fire
For I am busted-lipped and scurvy
Thorned skin glowing Kiss my spokes
But always it will be never It will be too late and lustrous
Into me lightning everywhere and you lovely
And leaching out of our chests All of us
Coming Anvil-tongued We will be
Sundered with light
Kinematics
Someone is hanging from an ice pick
Wrestled into my lung
But I haven’t had Blue Cross
In so long it might only be my memory
Of a blue jay chasing the others away—
House finch, sparrow and pigeon—
How it sat at the feeder,
Beak-high, without eating for hours.
The entire afternoon I watched, reliving
The smoke-dark morning I shot my best friend,
And how four years later, seniors
In high school, we sat drunk on Pabst,
Squeezing the remaining buckshot from his calf
As a girl we both thought was ours
Watched, a cigarette burning a knuckle
On her hand. The moon was something
I will never remember and plutonium
Was what I thought of the fireflies.
And now, when I leave my porch
The ground will give beneath my feet
On this day wet and comfortable
With warm rain. Most of the apples are mealy
With bruises, but I will sliver them
With my grandfather’s pocketknife, eat
Them with peanut butter while sipping green tea.
It would be much easier if I could
Say I have so much of everything I don’t
Remember loving anything at all, but really,