Scantily Clad Press, 2009
Smoke rises from a forest set on fire by the sun but we don’t care we have dogs that howl in summer nights.
Look where we are So I do, it’s not the end of the earth that’s all around, though I’m eons from giving a fuck, wonder who has ever known the redundancy of a swallow swallowing If you crack your neck with your mouth open right it’s three taps of a xylophone There’s speak of clearing the sunset view, but now, past the suicide line of trees, it’s mist, listlessly shading in
I was just looking up from where I was sitting under a sky of lost marbles and a tree with a bird feeder I had to duck under every time I came to your middle class brick and unashamed house where I broke a toe stumbling out the first time I left which was the first time I met you in the window across the street was what you saw every morning you lived there.
Is it odd my dog only sleeps affront the door locked? When I turn the knob inside the knob, she stretches out long and ambles to her bedding Then it cannot be turned I always flick one light on and off several times before they all manage to black out The switches, they're too many and soon her paws are like someone taking the reins, she pulls up dreamily I wonder if dog's gone blind remember their fields, or just the sensation of chasing something at night
I count leaves on grass like lightning bugs caught in a butterfly jar resting on a mantle in summertime Maine. Their flashing like that of an old man, his watch reflecting faces of gorgeous girls dangling from a corduroy pocket in his vest unbuttoned like a breeze blowing through orange leaves. I see this happen on grass through a window, retinas, before being lobotomized by the tornado tearing through my brain.
If anything’s changed, I don’t look forward to things easily and my mother just informed me, my friend wouldn’t be returning home today, that his welcome home party was some other day I am pissed off since the last time was when light beamed this way and that, I would not endure evasion It was too much to be under a tree, behind a bush, as toads bellied and we asked over and over again if they were really toads or some monster eating small children from the feet up I’d ease in though undercover, when I was allowed to move though I’d surely be shushed by whoever, one of her was around at different intervals, I thought each was all there was on summer evenings, with only the scare of unfading footsteps, watching June bugs flick about, and brushing mosquitoes away like hairs, not suckers Since any clap would disclose our location I wouldn’t want that, it was our place, even behind the shed, though I brought myself within inches, I never touched her Its far more pleasing to recall the cross over rate that my heart went against the space between, slowly enclosing Those summers, I’d get excited every night, I’d lose breath over something that never happened
The fake fountain in my kitchens still flow on the first of June a Sunday in the elderly hours of the morning. At least, we made it. This summer, there’s no skin only skeletons splintered along the Left Arm of America. I’ve been here longer than I’ve been alive and if air could rust the wind would really hurt. What’s left is tomorrow, the week after that, the blackened soles of my feet.
We are both spent flick flick flick flick Ignition gives me the light needed for my cigarette Making it burn down to the filter I kick it away Upstairs the girl where I left her on the floor I fuck her like a god next to my bed Both on our knees but no prayers are sent so maybe I am actually fucking her like a dog Slipping outside for some smoke my thumb grips in vein flick flick flick flick
Close enough for the sun to spit its asteroid seeds at my feet. We should chase the trains until fences explode in the ghost lighting. We all had bugs squashed against our eyelids. When the cul-de-sac finally collapsed, the swing sets just sat there.
I let it perch at that certain angle which leans even the cigarette into apathy. At this time of night, radio baseball is mind travel on a country porch. One day maybe I’ll lose thought of the murmurs she would release in sleep, how my awaking seemed each time to elicit a flight of birds. Her lidded eyes turning moonlit up to the window to shade her in just right.
David and his dog Adrienne driving us stick through the unassuming deep blue of fall in Virginia. Jefferson in back with the dog counting grass through the windows by the gallon, this ark heading south in the shape of an oneiric auto but you can’t remember this because I can’t remember your name. Is it spelled with a C or a K (or an alphabet I never learned)? You can’t remember the way the sun sautéed the street or Adrienne’s unusual breed because I can’t remember your name.
Sparkling black behind the silhouette an entity holds the ball Playing with it, he shifts its weight slippery between hands Then it drops, but before the shatter invisible strings come tight He pulls at it and stretches what parts won’t come apart This puppeteer crystal clear motives like the orb me, you, are particles out of view
The rocks in the river look like coins cut in half on commercials for new knives a road runs parallel, barely beside a trail where language was born when the first man hesitated and uttered “um” now the river is a location where things wash up, the after life of junk nobody needed those knives we needed to cut through the fences surrounding something we never got to the hundreds of times we waited for a bus that took us to a place we didn’t want emptied us out among hundreds of others didn’t want to be there either but the state said we should so we went so there we were looking out windows wishing we were in rivers filled with rocks or dancing with the dangerous always fenced off from us but we were growing fifteen and coughing in a tiny wooden house in the woods behind her house I dream the river weekly wondering if I am broke because we couldn’t get through that fence did she leave me because we got chased from the golf ball factory?
As the spot coating moon sneaks past she connects like a two dimensional butterfly forever hovering and half-lit. So rarely am I hovered upon that now I wonder if she’s ever found the crossing point of light? I still the night by lying on the beaten furniture of a screened-in porch making my head her beat.
Devin Gmyrek and Timothy Henry are students at the University of Richmond. Devin is from Eliot, Maine and Timothy is from Voorhees, New Jersey.