Upshear
A short quavering message, my frock
disarranged, or auroral and synaptic like panic
grass, like
snakebite of course. Yes it could be, and so modern it hurts, like the past
which itself is a claw-hammer. Come on let’s go, or visionaries on the radio is
all we’ll have under a blizzard of days with the descending root, its rot and
orchid all the same. God, I don’t know how the retina does it, but floating in
the aqueous humor I see makeshift air-machines in their punky
infancy, coils unwinding in the afterdawn, leaving us
out-lustered under meadows, I think.
The dress I was wearing, no, the
dress and absent cigarette—what kind of haunt and weather reverse-enter
pastures on the overpass? “Sorry,” the night watchman said, “the deer and buffalo
own this town again,” stockpiled skies persist and we sleep in the crush
sluggish at the summing up. Who could have guessed that drastic cables fail the
freightment, one boy and one girl moored to some
small patch of tar-grass? To the paler men of Mars garrisoned in ruin, hello! Hello, hello—your voices are blinking,
the storm that triggered us is ending and roads ascend like balloons.
Fixity
Talk is wind-play and most of me a simple machine. I may be
ruined and made promises of or still less until yesterday when there’d be
breakage my love, no slinkier clouds than these and rambling are the
masses—from parlor grievance to proper munitions everyone has a hypothesis,
each hypothesis a zygote blazing fresh in a field, each field a head, each head
my own galleon. I wasn’t so sure. To the umpteenth decimal I’d remember the air
and we’ll laugh about it at dusk when camouflage is greater than the arc of
twin motionists and ten things all at once—more near
misses amidships, or downwind marimbas thereabouts.
Standpoint
How in the devil came these babies
here and their companion beasts of prey, the mice and pay phones underfed? Vapors in a tarry sky dear me, then homeward through the blood
grass damnified and as innocent at my seam as apples
in the old days, neither now in this economical age. Everything
you think fits inside a shoebox, hush. My head sinks into the pillow, no blame
attaches to me like a sleep-walker on the roof. But wasn’t this to be the
country of makeshift neutrality, our courtesies canonical, my hoop-skirt
thrifty and not too clean? You should be glad I imagine bygones backward
against the current so that we both may yet be truly modern. Gimme a nickel then, and I’ll
squawk like a fish hopeful in night geometries of yore.
Petra Backonja
lives and works in
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