Schwitters

remember, it's march . . .

Chales Demuth

Carroll Dunham

Lutz Bacher

WHAT’S THE CAPITAL CITY OF ECUADOR?


I stopped speaking in my wolf-den voice by the time
I was in college. The administrator poked at his keyboard, a

    classic ectomorph,
Are you seeing Disney characters anywhere? No,

I can't even name one. The literature on underground bats has them
as a food source for bad children, who if you ask me are the

    only worthwhile
children. I’d seen Jeremiah Johnson. Closer to respect than can

be imagined, the furs I wore. Shared blood over snow is an
intimacy, write that on your little screen. There were TeeVees

    on walls.
I first tried a pompadour—you can see this wasn’t quite

working—but I wasn’t finding my new “you.” Number of dependents?
Roy Orbison. That made one. Take off those sunglasses the

    professor told
me. I thought she wanted to see down to my soul. Incorrect!

SAD FLOWERS

He's back-shot, black blood; you get the noon re-
port. It's divided into pieces--they aren't things. They

   curve over
the wires. Hello, death in Africa, to you in your underwear.

Here's a blueprint of my pocket. When my face was wrapped
in muslin I could feel the dying animals, the places where they

   left salt
in my brain. Child, animal, things burned: what memories of

these will I bring with me out of the grave. Everyone has to
deal with lint. I pick the stuff off my aloe plant, it flows up

   out of
the baby's mouth and she's laughing like a dead Jazz Singer.

NO TOYS

Last night the moon
Wavered. The arithmetic
Of the deep ever-

Lasting. Or how much
Fun will we have
Tomorrow? Remote

Controlled boats are
What to me? They
Just fuck up the bird's

Patterns. My anti-fantasy
Lodges one in the cattails.
That's right. I might take

Your football away if
You kick it into my yard. I
Might kick it over the river

Toward the face of the
Wavering moon some night.
I'm a fool. I'll pay

Almost anything to
Charter a fishing boat.
It's just a matter of scale?

By the age of ten I'd not be caught
Dead in the company of anything an adult
Might mistake for a toy . . .

BONESET, WRAPPED IN BANDAGES

It came insinuating itself up the stairway tower—
giant lonely great-hall where I trembled purposefully

   between the
cries of atoms. You may surmise I have no idea what

I'm talking about. It's the slow heart. My cave in the fauna-
rich nursery, an australopith's tilted pelvis. I was never

   be-tasseled,
rather looming up stairs like a moose thinking inwardly about

dark, deep water. Introversion is a celebration of being,
or else. Or else, I die smiling with you, sister. My white

   skin under
hair, ridiculous narrative of the egg, until I pigment-out, sinking

into the cross-referenced strands of some evolutionary path,
too dumb to love it though. My color releases its secret . . .

XX

We sleep through the hurricane, an upright

symphony. The light of the stars filters what the brain

of a dragonfly cycles through. That's not a star it's
a satellite, you remember your father saying. The taste of salt, like

remembering the time you were forgotten on water.
It dies in its sleep.