30/30 day 30: Fragment

Leashed dogs cower beneath the porch
before dawn. Peeling planks of wood
swell out nails like teeth, widen gaps
to yawn lazy in expectation of rain.

You peel lemon after lemon, separating
each segment and salting them, a cross-
sectioned core of some planet, glowing
and never seen.

30/30 Day 27: You, carrying severed head on a shield. Me, the head.-W4M

It was that goddamn mirror you carried––no, hid behind––that distorted everything but your ankles, calves, the impeccable curve and crater of one shoulder from behind it. All I could see of you I wanted to keep, the hand that raised the sword a perfect sconce for a torch in winter, for cradling drying herbs in spring. To hold something with grace is a beautiful thing, you know. The sword fell and I felt your hands in my writhing hair. You will never be more perfect than this moment. I love you. I hate you. You could be preserved for all time. A work of art. Just look at me. Look at me.

30/30 Day 26: Apologies

You say I would be better off
                        apologizing to the ruptured capillaries
            of your neck, shoulder, collarbone.

Some things I refuse to do. Others
                        I refuse and do anyway. You repay
            the kindness by making a prison

wall of my back, the captive days
                        hash-marked and raw. Summer languishes,
            the breeze from the window, the fan

at the foot of the bed, like lying
                        in a shallow, lukewarm stream. Nothing
            will cleanse what bleeds through

the next page, the indelible reminders.
                        What stains and does not wash. What
            is not washed, in case.

30/30 Day 25: At Lorine Niedecker's Grave (2)

I.
II.

The groundskeeper,
            ill-tempered and precise,
                        mows between each stone.

The trailing swallows
            make every comment
                        on impermanence

we can stand. I do not
            believe in portents
                        or the chattering

of cicadas as something
            beautiful––moreso
                        their husks clinging

to the oak, the hand-
            rail, the front door,
                        incapable of holding fast

their violent contents.

30/30 Day 22: Reprieve

The spider starts rebuilding
in the middle of a storm which
you tell me is a beautiful woman

in India shaking a silk Dhoti
after washing, the quiet claps
of damp cloth making thunder

to shudder-rattle the windows.
Not half an inch of rain
since July first, I was told yesterday

by the farmer selling asparagus
thick as a thumb. His crops
will be flooded and joyous tonight,

with the rain which is the water
shed into that far-off river in sheets
from the garment's weft and warp.

30/30 Day 20: Table of Contents

In New Jersey, medical students
forbidden from studying cadavers

use bone chisels to pry the hinges
from the morgue doors. You show me

a film of a dog's severed head––
It's Russian you say, as though

that explains the apparatus
siphoning blood through its host.

Nothing tragic about these days
spent invading the living, the dead,

the students opening men like
china cabinets, reverence, care,

setting the table with our contents.
The dog licks its muzzle, calm

as we are, watching it track
a flashlight, turn its bloodied ears

toward voices. This is where
it started, you say. Now

that machine keeps organs alive.
Somewhere, a fist of red muscle

beats in a clear box before transplant,
a lung breathes deep without ribs

to confine it. When finished,
the students replace the hinges and,

inside, the bifurcated seams that split
their subjects are sewn shut,

not a stitch out of place.

30/30 Day 19: Pity From the Sirens (2)

II.

The tired snakes writhe above me––
I can never tell when it's raining

without looking out the window. Early on,
I would wake with a satisfied weight,

usually a mouse, a rat, a roach,
consumed while I slept. Only men

turn stony, other creatures freeze
from that scaly gaze I can claim

only distantly as my own. Nothing
strays close these days, but the snakes

will never eat one-another––how
could I destroy a part of myself

with so much work to be done?
When champions plead, their hands

make a beautiful place for bird nests.
Every man is bettered by stillness.

30/30 Day 18: Pity From the Sirens

            "...'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror..."
                        -Percy Bysshe Shelley

It starts at the eyes,
not that anyone asks.

Too often the limbs
break before everything
is done––I have too
many fallen arms
littering my home, shields
as platters, swords enough
to shutter the windows,
fence the yard.

Pity from the sirens
whose art needs only
a sweet song and
sharp stones, one-time
shows lauded for
sincerity and scale.

For me, a fine line
between victim and
sculpture. A man
will always guard
his face. I paved
the path last summer
with so many stone hands.

30/30 Day 15: Apocrypha

My grandfather tells
a story so filled

with detail it is difficult
to parse, the hallways

of the boarding house
wallpapered with horses

running a constant circuit,
the veranda partially

screened, mosquitoes
invading nightly. But it is not

the hooves of horses which
make the racket he pounds

on the dining room table
of our now-modest home, it is

the footfalls of a ghost
which braves the insects

and wanders the veranda
after thudding down

the eighteen––eighteen
he is quick to repeat––

stairs of the house.
He counted them nightly,

counts them now, and
as he leads me through

every haunted room,
I consider the crop circles

outside Verona, the pressed
grass fallen like dead men

in rows, which, viewed
from above, make

an asterisk, an ampersand,
the last period in a sentence

which nobody knows began.

30/30 Day 14: The Exotic Other

On a minimalist kick.

The Exotic Other

Conical mounds, linear, effigy,
                        the last in the shape
            of an animal only

if seen from above.
                        In a fistful of earth,
            shards of pottery,

blades of glassy stone,
                        a tooth, a tarsus.

                        .

A skeleton shipped
                        from Rochester,
            catalogue number

drawn in pencil
                        on the parchment
            floor of the pelvis.

                        .

An African village,
                        transplanted
            to the world's fair,

six months of buzzing
                        generators, impossible
            Ferris wheel, Pabst's

first blue ribbon. Imagine
                        going home. Imagine
            not going home.

30/30 Day 13: At Lorine Niedecker's Grave

Took a field trip to Ft. Atkinson today with the residential poetry program I'm TAing.

At Lorine Niedecker's Grave

Why do I always leave
            the milk on the counter,
                        just long enough for it

to spoil slightly before
            I replace it at lunch,
                        sour little secret;

my keys on the shelf
            staring me down as I
                        walk out the door;

my pen on the table
            of a dead poet consumed
                        by remembering

every detail, small
            as a seed, hidden as
                        a pencil that has replaced

a bone in a living bird?

30/30 Day 12: Yes/No/Maybe/Never/Always

When Aron hands me back the joint
           and asks if this is what I thought
           it would all be like––it all being,
           I thought, the spacious interior
           of his father's SUV, my body
           cradled in a palm of plush leather,
           a gently closed fist of metal,
           skyline receding behind us, all
           aglow and shrinking behind
           the hills as teeth behind lips––

30/30 Day 11: Fragment

The body is a timeshare of doubt
and overconfidence, each one
drifting in and out, leaving their
small, accumulating messes.

30/30 Day 10: Natural Phenomena

The horse inhales deeply
                        as it is saddled, and holds in
            hope that the rider will not

notice. The coyote gnaws
                        off her own front leg from
            the trap that has snared her,

counts this as a victory. I think
                        about points of entry without
            exit as my uncle flays a shad

still flopping on the gunwale,
                        this to use as bait for larger
            game. He spears a knot

of flesh around a palm-sized hook,
                        casts, waits. The horse will release
            its breath only when the rider

is mounted, toppling him from
                        his loose throne. The coyote
            will wait for the limb to die

before murdering the family cat.
                        The sturgeon which has taken
            the bait deep below is older

than I am, and in its surfacing
                        has irrevocably tangled our lines.
            The shad, half-skinned, flops

into the water and disappears.

30/30 Day 9: Navy Pier

She places a pile of ash ten
feet from the last, measuring
by footsteps toe-heel-toe-heel
as you tell me that everything
made by human hands looks
terrible under a microscope.
Constellations reveal themselves
in the poured concrete, but I don't
mention it, the woman's bicycle
(given over to the appetites of rust)
balanced with one hand as
the other, coated, ghastly, cradles
another half-cup measure mountained
like gray flour. You say that nature
presents itself as a beautiful series
of boxes within boxes, and here
the messy particulars of life and
death meet––what is contained
contains, what holds is also held.

30/30 Day 7: Thrift

Those mornings we rose to the newspaper
splayed across the living room floor, enough

red ink for a murder scene, our mother
poring over classifieds: everything

given was received, sought was found.
Here, a couch made home by wasps

last summer, a canoe portaged a county
too far, our city rivers thick and silted.

Every harvest took planning, the hand-
drawn map pointing the way from one

discarded oasis to the next and, on her
return, the living room became an orphanage

of mis-matched furniture and crooked lamps.
The house was a weakened body after a vital

transfusion––every surface new and flushed
with life, none of it recognizable as our own.

30/30 Day 6: Distance

2.

Here changes momentarily, a rail-
road, a bridge across the creek that

splits a tiny town in two, a silvered
vein of quiet in the rocky conversation

between shores. But already, here
is fields of grass shorn for the coming

heat which have hosted wars and their
children––you can almost see the bone-

meal beneath the bonemeal. Here is
not the forest, but the memory of trees,

and not the leaves, but rich earth
in their burned stead.

30/30 Day 5: Distance

1.

Listening to Radio Nowhere, looking
as you always do, at the mirror, or more
precisely, at the misshapen glass that
contains your reflection and all behind
you, surrounded by the oncoming road.

30/30 Day 4: On the Fourth

We discuss favorite words
after a smoke on the shore
of Lake Michigan, sailboats
numerous as teeth. Synopsis,
cathartic, vermillion, precipice,
vitalitous––this last one not
truly a word, but a better creation
to describe something's living,
the lush forest which walls
the beach, counterpart to the thousand
dead fingerling fish washed up
on the rocky transition between
sand and what I keep mistakenly
calling the sea.

30/30 Day 3: April/Aftermath

We shored ourselves
against the siege of winter
with all we had, blankets
worn as tissue, enough tea
to float a ship, and
when the creeping frost
finally retreated down
the oversized window
panes, everything
seemed broken or waiting
to break. Grass grows
through the garbage,
the roots of the tree outside
emerge from the laundry-
room walls, cracked and
crumbling, thin as thread.
By measures, we learn
to subside with these
reclamations, but they turn
us wild, our laughter
the heckling bark of dogs,
our smiles, the bared
teeth of some aggressor.

30/30 Day 2: Mausoleum

He was purported to say
that all the warmth had left
her body, so he built them
a warm place: old books,
dirty dishes, tarnished lantern,
her unfinished knitting draped
over an armchair, a casket
for him, too, across the way,
waiting, open. See, how quickly
the rest of us make quiet
room for grief, without ever
populating its spaces.

30/30 Day 1: Ask 1 Radio Psychic Network

The last piece of advice
threatens to topple
her swift-constructed
sureness. It's after
she has already asked
about wages, names, hours––
received all she needed
to know about being
on the edge of a break-
through, leaves prepared
to turn, big things
on the horizon and all
florid ways of saying
time inevitably takes you
elsewhere. With one
minute left, the psychic
asks about love, followed
by laughter on the line.
I feel in my head––the listener
corrects herself––my spirit,
I mean, if you can hear
the spirit in my voice,
you know I'm cringing.