“Black Dog Found” and other poems
Behind some airport some quiet organ -ization ignites a portable flare stack. Cindy, whose depression is tropical, is not yet a hurricane. Like a prophet I bore this news of rain in my thorax, secretly, a tumor encapsulated. My mother telling me this version rarely kills. Sixty-six shots from a rifle of the SKS kind but the congressman will walk again. They’ve cancelled this weekend’s festivities out of an abundance of caution. A tractor transmutes itself into dark smoke. One assumes it has the proper permits. The radio maintains a persuasive volume as we pass the yellow flier taped to its telephone pole in search of the crisis it solved: BLACK DOG FOUND.
This body runsproperly enough.
Don’t youget it?
The palaceis a courtyard.
Look at all thetiny functioning
people with theirpowerplant addictions and skin
-sized therapy worksheets.Doctor my papers
have already been submitted.I gained
admission under false-tto but my voice is in my chest.
The windowssmaller than advertised.
It’s a godsendthis whole
being sick thing.You don’t really have to eat.
Longish night, longer dusk. Enough gold to slate the dead ash
trees. Handiwork of the emerald borer, a fist piloting the coppery truck.
Post-prandially pulled the chrome grill back to position.
Had amassed two vegan patties, five or six full meat. Sometimes you get dead.
Slathered in croissants. A mixed bag of deads: Needle-feeder. Unliving
wages. Coil up in a birdhouse like a pile of blind hunger. Snake unhinges its own jaws.
