Go Outside: a Collection of Poetry

GO OUTSIDE: A COLLECTION OF POETRY

A thesis submitted To Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

John Joseph Roth

Thesis written by John Roth B.A., University of Akron, 2014 M.F.A., Kent State University, 2017

Approved by

Dr. Catherine Wing , Advisor

Dr. Patricia Dunmire , Interim Chair, Department of English

Dr. James L. Blank , Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

TABLE OF CONTENTS...... iii-v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..vi

POEMS

Bird Watching...... 1 A hike into the hereafter...... 2 Bird Kill ...... 3 For every heartfelt bird ...... 4 Unwelcomed Spring ...... 5 In the forest there are no kind spirits ...... 6 Little Worry ...... 7 Go Outside ...... 8 Wintering as animals ...... 9 Peel away brightly ...... 10 With a vibrancy that kills ...... 11 Beauty ...... 12 Wildfire Arsonist ...... 13 Helen ...... 14 Angel Grist ...... 15 Prayer-Eater ...... 16 Larval Memories ...... 17 Locust Bomb ...... 18 12:00 AM, another front porch gathering ...... 19 A field guide to acting on instinct ...... 20 Escaping the ant farm ...... 21 Houseflies ...... 22 Swarm ...... 23 Mud Dauber Wasp ...... 24

iii

Alarm pheromones ...... 25 Mud Chaperon ...... 26 Resurrection Minutia ...... 27 Portrait: Death of the Matador ...... 28 Pagan Dark ...... 29 I dissolve into many voices, none quite my own...... 30 Funeral Procession Etiquette ...... 31 Bog People Convention ...... 32 My ghost as apology, not enough ...... 33 Cadabra cadaver ...... 34 Death by Osmosis ...... 35 This river is starving; so am I ...... 36 Boatman on Lake Erie ...... 37 Drought ...... 38 Dear Ocean,...... 39 Sex on the beach was not meant to be taken this literally ...... 40 Ad infinitum ...... 41 On the boardwalk ...... 42 You are not sea glass ...... 43 Sailor’s Litany ...... 44 Exposé on slow drowning ...... 45 Shower thoughts ...... 46 Betta Fish ...... 47 Head-Case Aquarium ...... 48 Vegetable Hurt ...... 49 A beast among bunches ...... 50 Arboreal Standards ...... 51 The farmhand falls in love...... 52 To the neighborhood stray ...... 53

Paleolithic Afterlife ...... 54 Gentrified ghosts ...... 55 Urban Exploration ...... 56 A moratorium on self-being ...... 57

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank the NEOMFA program, along with Kent State University, for giving me both the necessary time and resources to finally bring this collection of poetry to fruition. I’d also like to thank Dr. Wing for not only being a wonderful mentor, but for being someone whose genuine interest and deep knowledge of modern poetics could motivate almost anyone to write. Without her various classes and workshops, I doubt I’d see poetry the same way. Of course, I also want to thank my committee members for their invaluable insight throughout the years and the continued kindness that they showed me through each interaction I had with them. Dr. Biddinger, you have inspired me more than you know. And to Dr. Brady, I’ll miss our small weekly workshops and your amazing flair for recitation. Finally, I’d like to thank both my parents for tolerating these inane aspirations I seem to have. At least I can say I tried and that to me is what’s ultimately important.

Bird Watching

There are no birds in this forest you declare, sweat nesting in the crook of your armpits, blackened with thick twig-like hairs. You don’t see all the green hunchbacked stones around you, the slithering network of moss growing at your feet. A whirlwind of branches scrapes overhead like open wings. Do you see anything yet? you ask. I see nakedness as its own camouflage. The gypsy moth must simultaneously be tree bark and night-prowling insect. Hiding from predators in this way becomes just a natural part of who we are. Be still, I want to catch them out in the open you say, hoping to glimpse a pair of dingy yellow warblers flit through the rain. But the veer of birdcalls are erased by gunshots and the sound is carried back like the limp, feathered scruff of their deadweight. You think something’s not there until it finally is. Even now, you see the way light sneaks around the curved lens of your binoculars and still believe the field is empty.

A hike into the hereafter

The injured sky, limping; blue-leg drag.

Shaky pieces of light begin to mirror the deep, jade bruising of ghosted treelines, fall short into the frozen, stone-neck crevices that I press boots to, releasing a firm squeal of air.

(Something alive and throaty kicks beneath my feet?)

I follow the river’s cold, wet slice, dimpling water frail as a smile. Raven-crowned pines evaporate into a bright mass of feathers, their kingly shadows eaten up by some flaming ether, the sheer magic of it.

I have found myself picturing each new dawn, sleep-shaken, slack within its gilded frame.

Racked by the urgency of waking

I walk at daybreak before the oxeyes fume and bellow, before the sun can grip these snow-collared mountains.

Bird Kill

For a moment, the hawk unbuttons its gold-rimmed eyes from the field, fluttering among branches like a dusty, red cape. If those talons could peel a snake from the road and leave behind the anguished root of its shadow, then maybe I, too, could be lifted from all this.

But even then, I look up to see a den of white-bellied clouds swallowing the whole world, serpentine in their motioning.

Still, there’s safety somewhere in that sky, or so I’d like to imagine, not just the murky fling of starlings that drop dead in the middle of the road en masse.

The explanation’s not so important as the aftermath.

If I could, I’d grow tower-length arms, reach up, and put every single fallen bird back where they belong in the sky.

For every heartfelt bird

Among the nests that halo distant trees, the crow’s orchestral feasting of globe-lit eggs, disconcerting yolk-rattle.

The embryo that falls, yellowing like twinned lightning, threads itself into flight.

Or doesn’t. Grass clutches its body dearly;

a rosy cinch buried beneath all that throttling bloomage. I leave the dead baby bird to gestate in the garden. Tulip-bellied earth.

Out front, a single feather floats across a pool of water like a longboat. I wonder just how long it’ll take to reach the other side.

Unwelcomed Spring

When I wake up, I’m frozen to the ground in some cave I don’t recognize. I practice thawing myself out, concentrate hard until all the blood in my body starts moving again. I chase away the frost on my arms with hot breath. Ice turns into a steady trickle of water as I begin to free myself slowly. My knees bulge outward, beginning to split apart like two huge arctic shelves about to crack open. There’s an accumulation of senses. Little by little, the dark becomes less dark and the cold becomes less cold.

Stepping out into the world, I’m hibernation-thin. I fill my stomach with rocks and pinecones. A purple tangle of crocuses snarls at me from underneath the snow. Even icicles hanging from dead tree branches grasp for me like the hand of a ghost. Because the robins are gone, I warm their blue eggs in my mouth and wait until my tongue falls out like a newborn bird from its nest. At the first sign of warmth there is madness.

In the forest there are no kind spirits

Tonight the moon will rise like a body from the coldest lakebed. On shore, a woman milks the sediment from her hair, catches a moth in her hands before it is sprung into the mouth of thieving nightjars.

In these silent hours, a single lantern knocks against the oak-filled darkness, pries ghosts from their gravestones on a night so beautiful they wouldn’t rest anyways. And in the reeking twilight afterbloom, the heat-crush of summer, thorns will stitch themselves into fresh deer hide, a rite in which both animal and blood will run together once again until daybreak.

Little Worry

I could not find you, calling out to me like a cricket in a field. With these dirt-filled hands and splintered fingernails, I tore away each stone you once called refuge. I searched for you among those stiff crawlspaces of earth.

Still, I could not find you. Trembling somewhere in the grass, your body folded itself into the tiniest shadow.

Where are you now, my little worry? Will you be sad when Summer forgets you? When I forget you?

You have your own worries too, I’m sure.

There are birds that want to peck and swallow you bit by bit, each amorous chirp the only weakness in your armor.

So go ahead, sing your little victory song for now;

I know how my closeness silences you.

Go Outside

August, September, October: each month there’s less and less daylight. It starts getting dark out when I notice the way an oak tree can sway like a lantern, a blue jay squatting in its branches like a little blue flame trapped under a bronze canopy. It’s cold. I feel the raw body heat spill from my jacket and do everything I can to contain it, jerking sleek metal buttons into place, pulling down my sleeves so that the chill no longer settles oh-so comfortably against my wrists. I walk around the foaming edges of a pond and the pond chimes back to me like a bell chiseled from cobalt.

The sound leaves my ears before it even enters. This is a season for departure. See how the birds go south for the winter and blossoms retreat into their pale stems. Life has its own pace and each month I’m living less and less within its fervent steps.

Wintering as animals

The snowstorm moves in overnight like a deer flagging its tail, a cold and timid creature whose eyes signal power outages, and in that blackness chews telephone poles into toothpicks.

The wind in its hooves could knock over houses, kicks until icicles, all fiery and prismatic, shake from gutters like predawn antlers. When morning comes the snowstorm has passed. What’s left: A blizzard’s skull dwindling away, its jawbone tumbling off into the light.

Follow the footprint of any animal and you’ll eventually find it.

Through the mud, through the snow, through frozen leaves.

Follow the footprint of any animal and you’ll eventually become it.

Peel away brightly

I dismantle an entire orchard, pull apart twigs from mist; all that morning-measured soak and tangle.

The wooded sound of trees knocking around is normal. I take down wintered over homes flooding with feathers. Bird-nest-scratch.

When citrus ignites the air

I watch smoke stem outward. My nose bottles up the heat-wrung scent of oranges, corkscrewed dust. Lashed with rot, rinds snap open on a fibrous hinge.

Throngs of flies walk through a piece of fruit like some cool passing.

Without waste, even this pulp bleeds potential.

With a vibrancy that kills the rainforest pipes up with its saturated mouthful of poison dart frogs, spits accent chromatic.

One by one I smash them, lay their tiny bodies against tribal arms like wet-skinned tattoos.

There’s a certain toxicity in all this brightness, a birds-of-paradise sway towards death’s pigmentation.

From canopy-thick skulls, a drainage of butterflies.

I, razor swarm honey, collect and collect.

Everywhere a buildup of color: Sweet white termites milked from their mounds, the blue waters wheeling softly around and around, and me just waiting for those subtle grains of fog that stitch themselves to everything in this phantom jungle heat.

Beauty

The surface of the water is beautiful, but it is no good to sleep on. —Ghanaian Proverb

I see it every day, the way the grass swoons with drought because the sun’s so hot out over the vast plains that even a lion’s haunches could melt away, eely flames leaking into muscled gold.

The lead-scraped insides of wildebeests are left to smoke on the savannah, their long-faced ghosts still graze among the ashes. All that remains are remains.

I’d wear the shadow of an eagle-hawk just to hide my dying self.

I count the many yellow butterflies that swarm a piece of animal dung for the nutrients they crave, their wings gasp as if to show disgust towards the very stench from which they feed.

Is this not beauty? Like carrying out a tribal hunt,

I search the land and find myself closer to the more latent happenings of the world. I lift a stone, only to be hoodwinked by some murderous viper.

Wildfire Arsonist

Every tree has a wound worth revealing. I pull back where the bark grows its thickest and find a misshapen face locked into the wood. I do this many times, going from tree to tree, and each time the face is always the same. Dry leaves wrinkle in the heat of the sun, their spines needling the hot-smelling forest air. Exhausted, I sit at the base of an elm tree, watch the patterns in its bark crawl upward like a score of centipedes. Roots fish around in the soil, pulling their nutrients up from the same dark place.

It doesn’t help, knowing that some wounds are identical. Every habitation destroyed calls for rehabilitation and I’m happy to play my part. I measure myself by the blaze I create. And right now, it feels like I’m covering the whole damn planet. As the forest continues to burn, I glance up to see starlings blow across the sky like sagging cones of ash. But afterwards it all still looks the same. The frail black outline of every tree a specter raised.

Helen

There she stands, on a limestone terrace facing the Aegean, where the sails of warships grow like a half-stitched moon against the horizon.

Her chariot of hair rides high in the wind, two slick, black wheels gliding over each shoulder. She watches as Troy burns beneath her. Every shadow turns like a sword, the city walls howl with murder. An arrowhead bronzed with blood is stuck in the base of an olive tree.

Trojan soldiers hurl heavy clay roof tiles at the invading Achaeans down below in an act of desperation.

She is smiling now, so that each death brings out more of her beauty.

Her dry, cutthroat laugh shakes the sea-bitten air.

Only she knows what it’s like to be so alone in all that treacherous beauty, to devour what this night has provided her with: an offering bigger than any god.

Angel Grist

Faith has failed me. Bread isn’t life, but afterlife, as if god snatched

his angels from stalks of sunlight, razor-gold, and stripped them

down into weak willed grains, picking through their wing-fluff.

The clouds turn like a huge, grey millstone, circular and wet.

Under a mountain’s thin basin seraph-husks are made into bone flour.

At the hour of becoming they are leavened into song.

Prayer-Eater

In some unwatched corner of sky a spider dribbles silk minarets, cloud-spun and fluorescing, all up and down these sacred, blue walls.

Here the light has a tension of its own, prayers struggle in a web-soaked haze like flies. I think of what it means to pray and only come up with prey as the answer. At night a shadow slips out from the spider’s dusky burrow.

Legs tick. Vibrations are snagged midair.

When the feeding is over it crawls back into an orb-nest moon. Again, I’ve put my faith before the fang.

Larval Memories

I locked myself away in a room flooded with mirrors. It was dark but not dark enough. I couldn’t stop seeing myself through cocoons made of glass, trapping in prismatic veins like the inside of an oyster shell.

One window in the room filled with an invasive light.

The curtains bunched together like a pair of moth wings soaked in a pale, luminescent dust. Each night I spun myself further into that loneliness, ate through the moon’s tender negligee then tried to sleep.

When I wept, a moth wriggled out from my tear duct and fell dryly into my hands.

Without ever chasing lamplight, the moth began to fly around the room, a wool-hungry echo pinned against its stomach. I heard something inside myself and listened to the groveling of little wings all night.

Locust Bomb

Caustic, white halos stretch over fields.

Locust murmur under wing.

A crop-duster breathes pesticides down their necks. When the angel of death finally arrives do not take notice.

Every seventeen years or so the land reawakens with its hungering stir of insects. Green famine swells in the cannibal frenzy of summer. Scientists have proposed that locust create swarms in order to minimize the risk of eating one another. Craving the success of others is just a natural way of moving forward.

Even in times of want, there’s always someone craving what little you think you have.

12:00 AM, another front porch gathering where spiral-shaped bulbs fluoresce through powdered glass as moth wings paddle deftly in the splash light.

Moonbeams kiss the ceiling with stone- white lips; raw taste of opal smoothed out over pointy stucco tongues. Naked,

he sits on the edge of his bed, wondering how long it takes for darkness to fill a single given space. All night, his mind

buzzes with insomnia like the tiny box fan shoved into his window. From shifting drawers to tangled blinds, a ghost-hand

(not his own) slips in and out, then back again.

The shadows tallied on his headboard not a mark, but a compendium of muted stars.

A field guide to acting on instinct

Monarch butterflies hang in midair as if they were pinned in place by some entomologist’s strange hand, their tiny, black guts wound-up like thread, a gold-nectar serum illuminating their monsters from the inside.

I see how the monarch walks across a head of milkweed, purple spikes blooming from the plant’s veiny center, its proboscis unfurls into a language of unspoken hunger:

I am beautiful and worth sustaining. The monarch drinks poisonous milk so that its entire body becomes toxic.

For this reason, I’ve always wondered why people praise the butterfly for its beauty. Maybe it’s the way its orange wings rift the air or the way the wind will sometimes catch a swarm of them like a giant, sweeping net. But even birds know better, that the monarch’s coloration is more of a telltale warning sign than anything else.

This is the kind of beauty you want to avoid, the kind you don’t want to sink your beak into.

Escaping the ant farm

Ants move in line like the stray hourhand of a clock which sometimes moves in puzzling stretches minutes burrow into a balding gold hill made from wristwatches each gear colonized by micro-thin teeth feeding off the queenly spread of crystal condensation trapped under glass like honeydew and maybe time is an ant which carries you away on six terrifying legs the black bulk of its head shadowing you helpless rendering you as foodsource so wreck the hourglass now watch the tunnels unravel the hours held ransom fall now stomp down their nest in the sand

Houseflies

Each summer they somehow make their way into the house, stealing the very air with their wings, dirtying the world beneath them with their little, rot-specked feet. Just because they’re called houseflies doesn’t mean they belong in the house. When flies infest the thin-waisted curtains of the living room, I open up all the windows and watch them get swallowed up by the mouthful. The next day the room is filled with flies again. Dangling from the ceiling, my flypaper talisman sweet-smacks them against the shimmering amber surface. It’s not pretty, but it works. I know they must all be coming from somewhere: maggots boiling to perfection in the feces-ridden yard, their dark wet movements within, circled by blonde spears of grass. While working outside, I see maggots waving from a dead robin’s chest like white-gloved ladies on a sinking ship, only, they’re happy to sink this far. See them dig themselves out from the shadows, from breastbone and half-eaten bird heart. I’m sorry if all this talk of decay seems indecent. There’s nothing decent about it.

Swarm

The hornet-faced apparition of grief

roams on black wings, hunts over waxy slopes of skull.

Its colossal mandibles,

all ocher-mooned, saw paper homes in half, can unscrew a bee’s abdomen like

a living jar of ink and honey.

Pale as some afterlife hope, abducted larvae

are slowly eaten alive until so many bees begin to ball up around the hornet that it overheats to death, like a supernova, and the bees

just go back to work because nature is simple: Only the colony that still exists gets to labor

for its happiness

Mud Dauber Wasp

When the mud dauber wasp hunts, it doesn’t kill its prey but only immobilizes it, using the dripping twilight of its sting, lifts its black slithering barb to paralyze jumping spiders, orb weavers, and crab spiders.

Once the mud dauber carries them all back to the nest, this harvest of spiders is stored within mud tombs. Trapped in a many-eyed darkness, the spiders see something move among them:

The slow-segmented horror of white larvae crawling towards them. Sometimes I imagine seeing my own demise from every given angle, the slow devouring stillness like a nightmare being played out over and over again.

The little thoughts inside my head grow hungrier by the minute, but where else can my brain go to escape them?

Alarm pheromones

A thousand bees kneel against your skin and commit seppuku, their swords hover in past dedication

of you. The glittery jag of digestive tract left behind speaks to the way they mindlessly defend. You are a threat.

Over the summer, all of your asters faded into asterisks. You don’t take any more risks. Fencers who dress in all

white look like bee larvae. Their facemasks are meshed-in like a giant compound eye. I, too, have a tendency of

doing the most damage to myself when delivering my sting to others.

Now, watch me crawl away. This is how I die.

Mud Chaperon

After the storm, hundreds of caskets wash up onto the street, battering each other like bare pieces of timber caught in a logjam.

The caskets pile up, some of them empty, some of them half-open. Gravesites burst with new wounds. No more body than sediment, a skeleton passes into muddy floodwaters. But even so, the dead are not wasted. Using sharp little tongues, wild animals start to corkscrew marrow from their bones, slim as wine bottles. And there’s good reason to celebrate; the whole world is a corpse in plain view.

Worms blush at the extravagance, ribs packed like a ballroom with all these little guests.

Sleeves of mucus gather then uncouple in the dark.

Resurrection Minutia

A mouse skeleton unwinds in the palm of my hand, plays between each finger like a bony ribbon before coming back to life.

Each tiny digit springs with new music. Animal reflex.

I softly brush its ribcage with my thumb like a miniature harp. Its vertebrae retuned; the same blood and warmth that hums through everything.

I set the mouse on the green margin of the lawn and watch it sprint off, it’s tail swept clean, the light still twitching where it’s body rested in the grass.

Portrait: Death of the Matador

The matador, near dead, is no longer sun-backed, his suit’s lucent threads crawl out from under dusky epaulets, exhumed from mounds of sequined gold.

A dark sky sleeks its head downwards; bulls encircling him in the great ring below. There, he devours endless tails of smoke.

If only storm clouds could be a black sprawl of jetting muscle.

Sour exhalations of lightning.

His palms drift across the potbellied ladle in their backs like boiling milk. Each bull pelt tagged by a cloak of seven spears.

An axial blur of horns rushing towards his heart, everything sharpening, and for a moment, the matador puzzles at his own ribcage. The kill: a single drop of his blood unfurling unthreateningly in the dust.

Pagan Dark

At night toads growl through the brainy thicket of my skull.

Again, I am dreaming.

In a swamp so quiet it’s almost purgatorial, my fog-rattled sternum opens like a drawer full of spoons; every rib becomes a utensil torn from the warm velvet of me.

Sometimes I am hunted by a witch mob of selves, flashlights bobbing like will-o’-the-wisps: I will not follow.

Always death by water or fire.

My tongue carved into swollen idols, voice sealed in a strongbox.

There’s a mutual fear somewhere in all this, between me and these selves; how I can always run towards the darkness to feel safe from persecution until the worst of me is dragged out in front of so many uncompromising lights.

I dissolve into many voices, none quite my own.

A locket spreads open like gasoline, its outside thumbed gold.

Within, faces congeal into warm Polaroid.

Puddles weave in their own iridescence.

Drowsing silk. Hiss of skewered ozone.

From tar’s ropey ensnarement; a gummed up muscle-bound pearl.

Coined mineral tooth I preserve.

Your bluemoon aura stitched to the back of my skull. Midnight’s sultry tattoo, mute; this ink irreversible. Scabbed bed of stars.

I prepare the entrails of a harp & tie dead strings all along my arms until little bells begin to cluster around my wrist like honey.

Your dissonance, mine― same sweeter.

Funeral Procession Etiquette

First, you must always endanger the person in front of you by playing magnetic bumper cars on a rain-licked street so hot that the asphalt crackles underneath you as a shiny, black hearse crawls through the intersection like a beetle stomaching the dead with two little, white flags on each side of it unfurling into slippery wings. Second, you will feel both privileged and sad and run red lights and tell the impatient asshole honking ten cars behind you to kindly fuck off as you grieve. You will try to justify your sudden rage and say that you just need more time. It’s too soon.

It’s too late. You will never have enough.

Bog People Convention

I was keynote speaker on body preservation.

Being already dead I thought it’d be easy:

Hand me a boggy microphone and let me deadpan from a podium of flies. But the words took root in my throat, my diaphragm flowering, jammed with marsh marigolds. As I spoke, it seemed no one was listening and each idea

I presented sunk like a body into shale-black water until even a ripple gave pause. I was all pause fearing this dark continuance. Housed among reeds

I felt magnanimous in sphagnum. For centuries the wind passed over not through me. I ended up just fiddling with my lanyard then excused myself. My bones evacuated like sickly white cranes. I bloated with defeat.

I don’t know how much else there is to report.

My ghost as apology, not enough

I walk down a staircase of twisted teeth, chattering with light, to where the dead feed on day-old loaves of smoke and drink cigarette water from crystal decanters, grey-shaped, like a cyclone’s throat.

In the corner, a girl pulls black thread from her eyes, needles shuttle back and forth.

Pincushion-lips crush red polyester. Outside crows hunch like gravestones in the trees. I find gaps in the wind and wait, move on, ignoring the field’s mud-jawed rhetoric, its long gold circuit of wheat.

Cadabra cadaver

A jaw unclasps; the perfect jewelry, diamond-bitten, bone-stud.

Teeth cloud all the muscular parts tearing into the warm shimmer of me.

I was once a body, too, said undress this carcass real pretty.

Flies glinted like copper-faced buttons. Again, I am winged open.

My heart not a fruit. I let sparrows rust on the sagging eaves of my shoulders, pick tender seeds from me. Apples dabbed

with gloss and shadow give way to squatty blooms. The moon turns like a sliver of ankle in the dark.

Tonight, I’ll be a ghost squatting in someone else’s throat.

Death by Osmosis

A slain snail floats its puddle of a body meekly across the hissing salt flats that enheaven it.

This slick-pronged ghost; a glare that rides out over many wet-faced mirrors, fluorescent curl.

Amethyst sketches spiral lightly towards soft center shell, draws you in like the cracked eye of a hurricane.

Home once shackled to its back, but no more.

The gluey threads that winged their way outward disintegrate. Imagine having the very water ripped from you, turning so small, that even the way the world seems to shrivel away from you becomes somehow reductive.

This river is starving; so am I

I pry dead frogs from the sunken mud, their limbs all slick and mucus-stained.

Dignity was the first thing I learned to swallow, then small bones. It took some getting used to, though;

a croak in my throat which wasn’t my own. At night,

I slept in an empty heron’s nest, watched a cluster of bright,

yellow stars pollinate the sky. When I was thirsty, I would scoop up a handful of rancid pond water, bring it to my sun-cracked lips.

All those tadpoles wriggling between my fingers gulped down,

(both cold and salty on my tongue.) Even now, camping in the tallest reed bed

as cattails slap my back, I can hear them.

A thousand tiny heartbeats swarm my chest. Not one of them mine.

Boatman on Lake Erie

Today, the lake’s flat as a cutting board.

A man wearing yellow rubber gloves handles each freshly caught perch, bangs them hard against the side of the boat so that their bones fly up through their throats like wax worms.

He fillets them, knife swimming through striped green skin. Ice-white fish meat is then laid in a cooler, scales everywhere, the bottom of his boat grimed with stars.

What isn’t usable goes back into the lake where the water’s brown and walleye kick off the bottom with a sandy glimmer.

Looking out over the surface, the man tries to judge just how deep the lake is. All the veins in his body float still like a swallowed net.

Drought

A pond curled up into a lifeless thing.

Hordes of coal crawled deep beneath it like leeches to be extracted.

Alien bubbles swamped the surface, gasping in its watery light.

Muck-lung catfish walked the bottom until their skulls dropped out, turning into a thick oxidized yellow.

Fishing hooks laced every tree to better catch songbirds.

A rainbow-spun screen of dragonflies fizzled in the sun like fireworks.

Everything was dying or somehow reduced to it.

Whenever a body of water dries up, it’s reanimated as rain.

One day you’re a puddle. The next, commander of the ocean’s tireless blue legion.

Dear Ocean,

Barefoot, I walked the fish-plagued shallows of you, where water moved beneath me with a liveliness that sickened.

And how could you not be sick from all this?

Pull back your mist-toned colored flesh and see the helter-skelter movement of ships running through you.

Look on a microscopic level and see the luminescent threat of phytoplankton darting around. My added pulse was just another symptom.

A seagull plunged into the ocean like a hissing syringe, came up empty.

No way to draw out this disease.

Ocean, it must be exhausting to be you, to hold so much life within such an immense body so that your heart seeps up through your chest like lava from a cracked seabed, so that you don’t even know where your own body begins.

Sex on the beach was not meant to be taken this literally

Somewhere along the beach, I accidentally stepped on what I thought appeared to be a dead jellyfish, but turned out, it was just a soggy bust-open condom.

This was no creature from the deep.

The fact that it had no tentacles should have been my first clue.

Also, it was a fucking condom.

Sure must have been romantic, though, two bodies slumped over each other as waves chipped away at the sweat and sand castle built

between their legs. How great it must have been, moonlighting as lovers. Like boats that moan in the harbor, I can almost hear the sea still dripping with their sighs.

Ad infinitum

I stand on a pebbled shoreline playing fetch with the sea like a stupid dog.

Whenever I hurl the lifeless hunk of driftwood into the water, the waves quickly retrieve it.

And no matter how many times I fling that damn stick out there, the ocean always brings it right back to me, completely oblivious as to why

I threw it out there in the very first place.

On the boardwalk between the chapped glow of hands and palm-smattered railings a crumbling wax pearl is divvied up into smooth fragments.

The lotion bottle wheezes lavender, then froths of purple salt, then…

From her silk-spilled purse, steadying a pocket mirror to eclipse the world around her, before its peripheral flare up, a woman suspects her own hair to be curled like tiny, black seashells that multiply in the muck. Their echoes could tear her down. (Tear her down.)

The sea is nowhere in sight.

You are not sea glass

The ocean rolls its slim, white cuffs.

Exposed sandbars; wrist bone shallow.

This coastline’s but a smudge.

Diamond-sleeved chivalry behind the pitch of every wave. Ripples swinging upward. I listen to an aria of seashells and claim my own echo.

Water, fraying into web-thin mist, hangs like a great net over lighthouses.

I am sometimes blind to the tragedy of others. When the stiff, grey surf comes and sweeps you from the shore it won’t always be so gentle-handed.

Sailor’s Litany

A ship’s rib nursing vermin. Springy plank wood smells green like young cedar, but nothing tender about the sea muscling its way on deck and saying

Hmm, I think I’ll keep this one.

Man overboard; a new trinket for the dead to play with. The rough ocean waves sawing at the bottom of a ship lets water slip in. The fat man with a belly that juts out like an island bets he can peel the jaundiced face off another man and eat it like a split-open lemon.

Piles of salt haunt the men in their dreams; spells out ghost and fever. A gull’s eye tastes like raw fish eggs, pops beneath the knife and teases out a black fluid.

In the coldest depths there is no saving light, only darker, deeper.

Exposé on slow drowning

People in the rain glide like marionettes, movements not their own.

Wired by rainfall, they’re pulled towards better shelter by the runniness of their own limbs. Spring open any umbrella and you’ll find a skeletal rig of metal wriggling just underneath, swallowed up by a monstrous puff of fabric.

This imperative to not get wet, so unavoidable when we’re already 60% water.

But still, I see dry-bodied people swept to where the park’s bend shoulders them as the bark on trees begin to soften like a wet trench coat right before sliding off.

Shower thoughts

The showerhead hovers above me like a stalled UFO, chrome-capped, equipped with stars that mineralize their own light. Sometimes my body tries to float away from me.

When the hurried gravity of water comes down, my scalp flattens, all the loose hair on my head begins to gather at my feet.

Even my own dead skin wants to escape me, a grey film pushing out from underneath my fingernails like dark energy out into the universe.

I’d rather be anything than this glassed-in bath’s specimen, to listen to the faucet’s hot-breathed stammering. When I get out,

I’m covered in soapy glyphs. I feel so clean it’s almost alien.

I look in the mirror and think maybe I’m not so different, that maybe change is just a black hole’s disfigurement of everything around it.

Betta Fish with flung open gills, will battle their own reflection.

Horizontal bars stretch all along their bodies the more stressed they become, scales darkening into glamour. At pet stores, Betta fish are kept in tiny containers full of water that, stacked on top of each other, look like a perishable hoard of pretty things.

Every fish sold lifted from the stagnant display.

The aggressive beauty of Bettas is what naturally combats the eye:

The marble blue-pink of a crowntail, the black veiltail Betta with its heart as soft as a bloodworm pellet, ribs shaped like a thumbprint jammed against a plastic lid.

A full masked, metallic-turquoise-black, short-finned fighting style Betta that wrestles with the waveless depths of its existence, but always feeds with an upturned mouth.

Head-Case Aquarium

Fun fact: A spark has the lifespan of a carnival goldfish.

Sometimes I tamper with light switches just to watch them swim around inside oily, glass bulbs, dragging their little, orange tails of fire through strained filaments.

Listen for the heat of their music.

Gold scales dazzle, molten koi ponds dug out from every muddied sunrise.

My eyes detach, float away from my skull like fat buoys. I snatch at them. Miss. I’m winning and losing all at the same time. The smallest transactions are key: Exchange one coin-sized breath for just three more minutes to live.

Vegetable Hurt

Let’s say you’re unpacking groceries in your kitchen and a recently store-bought zucchini just happens to roll off the countertop, still swimming with plastic bags, and bounces hard against the floor. The wet indentation left where the zucchini’s skin made impact hovers there like a little death-mark or a fruit fly, so you decide to make your well-liked zucchini bread instead of wasting it. Or maybe you decide to simply cut out the bad part and store the zucchini away in the fridge for later. You wish you could do this with a person but you can’t: cut out the bad part, improvise so that they can serve some other purpose and not go to waste. You wonder if vegetables feel pain and check Google only to see that they can react to certain stimuli but this isn’t the same thing, which makes you feel slightly better. These aren’t your typical home-grown vulnerabilities we’re talking about here. Later that night you go to sleep and dream about having a bruise on your arm that doesn’t heal but instead grows bigger and bigger and bigger until you suddenly wake up and your hands lay against white sheets now seeded with yellow sweat.

A beast among bunches

In the kitchen, pans gather overhead like huge carrion birds, slipped on nesting hooks as they molt, thin flake or feather.

Let their wings grease the sky: cast-iron wingspan, black-foot handle.

Last week’s banana left crouching by the microwave; brown-spotted, by now, turned leopard. The fiercest fruit there is.

Travels, fibrous pawed, and prowls countertops, only remains this still because it wants you to see it stilled.

It will stay that way for so long that you’ll forget as it ripens, which is to say advance towards a certain sweetness:

Glucose-crystals furred, mush-skull-eyes. In a predatory haze, it will strike, not with teeth, or claws, but rather some newfound hunger within you.

Arboreal Standards

All summer the maple trees just jog in place shake their little roots off you can really feel the wind circulating now as they turn their leafy headbands inside out all sap-perspired, a delicious yellowing down the bark that birds, insects, and mammals feast on because it’s become almost natural to flourish off the hard work of others and there have been people who’ve tried to do the same to me, tap into my quiet body, their mouths opening expectantly for a warm flush of sap, but no I wouldn’t give, I wouldn’t give

The farmhand falls in love

There’s this girl who’s got a forest tucked behind her ear with a little, red barn swallowed somewhere in its supine acreage

(let her heart bang open,

an animal against its corral.)

The honeyed musk of straw inside is enough to nauseate the most clear-headed farmer, pitchfork in hand, sunlight parceled

into clean-cut bales of hay. Golden heft, twine swishing. Near the barn is a bruised creek that, if you ask the girl, moves like a switchblade stabbing outward from her body, my own

fingers trying to work themselves some

-where between the soft clay of her ribs.

To the neighborhood stray

The flowerbed isn’t your personal litterbox even though it’s been dry for weeks and the begonias aren’t really growing anyways, their dark pink petals squirm in the dirt like a litter of newborn mice. Will nothing deter you?

You’ve already eaten most of the patches of lemongrass and mint I planted alongside the house.

I’ve seen songbirds wilt between your teeth, your stomach riddled with their feathers and bones.

You stay stitched to your own shadow, avoiding the hot summer sun that clamps around your neck.

Living under the front porch of an abandoned house down the street, your existence is almost clandestine.

No one will claim you and you don’t want to be claimed.

You bat at a one-legged cricket circling helplessly about on the sidewalk. I go to shoo you away.

Your mouth flashes open and a dead thing drops out.

Paleolithic Afterlife

I enter the hospice ward with all its strange grunge & stratum of odors: piss-rubbed old folk (knit smooth by amber puddles), the workers who’d rather nurse their cigarettes in dingy stairwells,

(a single batch of tulips to cover all this?)

A man anchored with tumors sits there in his bed from the arcing black whiskery ruins of his skull

I groom for whispers come close to something audible perhaps one last request for water (his jawbone tectonic) he rustles up a cough almost ghostlike before dying as if to say there are announcements to be made in the smallest shifts his body stubborn as a fossil that resists all attempts to be pried from this world or to be brought to light in any other

Gentrified ghosts

The shadow of a chain link fence slinks around the perimeter of a construction site.

A generator huffs up gnats, clouds skid like bulldozer tracks across an oil-muddied sky.

In unbound fluorescence, gasoline ribbons run amok under dust; a spectrum of clumped colors.

Look at the caged high beam lights, the moths that do their little death-huddle around them. look at the houses that once held history away beneath a thrumming floorboard brain.

A wrecking ball sits outside, subdued, with an American flag stabbing outward in the wind as if to direct old cities to their graves as if to say these are the ones we are proud to destroy.

Urban Exploration

Dust sits like a heavy, bronze plaque over all the places you don’t see crumbling.

Let it all go to ruin, I say. If these pesky lettered specks are the summation of everything, then let them spell out no more or once was.

A hillside grins over the abandoned town I walk through, old shingles on old roofs glint like the backside of a petrified snake.

Leave the less beautiful things to themselves.

I see a black bear that turns out to be just a pile of ripped-up tires.

The cold ivory pause of a stained fountain basin no longer resonates with water. Not too far outside that same town,

I once went spelunking and saw the interior of a cave shake loose like a Persian rug being dragged out from the basement. Bats, thin as tassels, hung from the ceiling.

Rocks frayed into a quilted stratum of red, blue, green, orange, yellow, and black. It was all so beautiful that I vowed never to trespass there again.

A moratorium on self-being

I hid in the attic until my bones became heirlooms. By that time, no one was left to pass out my remains.

Poor planning on my part. In retrospect, sitting up here for almost thirty years,

I now realize that existence only truly comes after discovery.

If people didn’t know you were around, then you probably weren’t, at least not in their minds. And isn’t that the only thing that matters?

I wanted to be remembered as dust climbing up the curtains.

I wanted to be remembered the way a greedy smudge appears on the wall and you can only guess where it came from.

Light trips in through a small square window above me. I can feel it; the glass grows thinner every day.