BellumLetters (2.1)

BOOKS OF TOMORROW (waving goodbye)

the needle threads the space that was
the body before handguns, plastics.
glass-litter in the grass, a home
for ants, crow-gifts, a sublime
hatchet the sun glinting over
the tracks, razor zips away
towards corn, corn-fed autos
and stones stacked according
to plan (whose home?). Waxed
lumber builds our wishlist, snug
in water, a place for bones
to bend without a sound.

BellumLetters en route

I mailed out the BellumLetters chaps for Dusie yesterday. It's an interesting punctuation for a project that I feel is still developing. I like this actually -- the idea of publication as a moment of shift or diversion or pause as opposed to a sort of terminus or ending. It's almost a way to see it as a terminus in literal sense -- a point of simultaneous departure and arrival in all sorts of directions. Disruption.

In the end, I opted for a design that satisfied my desire for a tactile sense of the pedestrian. A design that used materials familiar to me from days in elementary school. The war is in everything I touch. It is even in construction paper and glue. And in stickers from kmart. Stickers that depict dog tags and tanks and army stars and bombers and helicopters. No ambulances. No wounds. No flag-draped coffins. No people even. Only the depiction of materials that remotely represent the human who wears the dog tags, who drives the tank, who flies the plane. And a representation in which "the enemy" is an absence. A space without. For a moment it possible to imagine that soldiers are released to this emptiness. That this emptiness is not a construction that intends to conceal the humans who live there. Live where soldiers are sent to fight. Sent to _________.

Foxglove (blood for oil)

As if it's made for loving: hollows
and veils, speckled
frolic over thin skin. I'm all
for moving. The wells dry
up and we're stranded
here, contractions obligating
rhythm, but the labor
disappears. Borders
dredged by bastards, our
hands swelling. If you
insist, I'll pick, but everyone
will know we're scared.

passage 2

vivarium

BellumLetters: A Project for National Poetry Month

P R E V E N T I O N

Today I drew marks
in the sand; they
reminded me of letters
or bones or teeth. Perhaps
you would call them vulgar.
The light pulls back
as an arm draws the arrow.
Bow, the bough breaking.
Rope and pulley singing
as wind throws birds
from the cliffs. It isn't even
ours -- this sand. We are
so stupid sometimes.

march

no war remembered how our hands held
or if the green sun was for growing
old or growing rain. There are numbers
I cannot understand and a glass hum
like saucers tilting away from
from oceans. A disc set
to spin as tires clear and darken.
Machine wreaths ringing halos
that clasp and sharpen
palms to palm-arrows
mining chime-shattered lines.

Sunday Morning

I waste. The water
looks red sometimes
as if it were your hair
or a penny-scar
from when the tree
let you go. Red beads
on the grass blades:
we expected as much.
We were taught
to play, to love
the honed thing after
death. When you
touched yourself
I was alone.
The doorway held
your father while
your mother made
the stair. Once
I left in the middle
of the night; I needed
to go home. Somewhere
the land is full
of what I felt
we needed.