Young Writers Society

removed by the author.

I eagerly await follow your pieces.

Here is #2

THE BODIES pt. II

My nose goes
where the moon goes.

Meaning, I am sensitive to tides
and event horizons. I recognize the shapes
of the barroom women, hourglass and tongue-shy

I keep receiving letters addressed to Tolstoy's bones.

when Dana reaps the false crops I will step
through the thrice-ninth kingdom
a cottage of converging circles.

I will present to the witch
a pocketful of bloody moons.

removed by the author.

Damn it, perdido, you're still as spectacular as you always were.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN SKETCHES

it is with wicked precision that Gomez
wields his motorcycle, guides it up
roads lined on either side
with blue spruce and aspens

This is Glenwood Canyon in the autumn
perpetual burning and rebirth
he stops at a motel in the springs
and the swimming pool is filled
with the ashes of dead forests.

in the chatty black darkness
of the Colorado night,
Gomez looks for stars
they return, like a lover
delivered into his arms
until tattered dawn.

KAMAS: glad you are reading! It's been awhile
NAVITA: oh shoosh. Anyway it's good to see some familiar faces.

I'm getting these six done tonight I hope.

DUST LOVERS IN AN OWL'S EYE

I reduced my lover
to a pile of threadbare bones,
in a snow of sand and ash I consider
the relative strengths of coffee,
cocktails, and contracts.

I think I'd go anywhere
and still see these one-eyed birds.
So I might as well go with you.

She fed me dreams
in a fever of prairie grass and tequila.
She packed my bags and sent me home
with my suitcase full of asymptotes.

LION CUB

I asked Maria if she still
keeps me on the shelf
with the dust stacks and automobiles
coffee rings and rabbit spines

if she still takes me down
and blows the dust out of my creases
sits me on her shoulder so I can fill her ears
with former whispers.

She always puts me away,
and I know I'm getting pushed
farther and farther back

into a desert of unfinished wood
and plaster, a meadow of shelf space
the width of a lion's roar.

Okay, so why haven't I read anything from you before, eh? Who are you and where have you been hiding?! Outrageous.

Jiggity: I did this last year, you musta missed it.

TEXAS

Christian, with his Swedish haircut
and his viking biceps, drinks a tall glass
of cold-front clouds. Bottled in 1982 over South Lake,
West Texas.

He points east, the sun at his side
he says, "I have seen the weight
of your worry."

"A ninety ton cube of limestone
resting on a tarmac of prairie."

"It is your job to grind this thing to dust."

First I use a hammer, a sledgehammer
acid, explosives. Either way on the inside
I discover a sculpture of Charles Darwin
with an engraving that reads, "the times:
they are a-changin'."

Glad to a fossil come back to life. More of you lot wandering around now.

RED WINE AND WHISKEY

I married the seventh bird,
but I wanted the first
and the sixth the most.

Maria with her dress
made of napalm and tiger tongues
Teresa with her barge of candy glass
and bear breath.

Baring teeth, I wait
in the fluorescent clinic
of generalized anxiety

One my one I stitch together pieces
of submarine hulls, I'm making a quilt
strong enough to survive
in the loneliest tracts
of enameled ocean.

APRIL CHARM

this is not a college town
with its steampunk pulse
and Gethsemane parks,

infested with drunks
bullying their way down brine-blurred
boulevards between plate-glass salons
and the swinging of early spring
its derelict trees

the city finds me in my room
sitting on the windowsill
staring at April's storms,
thinking and not thinking
of Aggie.

this is not a college town
with its steampunk pulse
and Gethsemane parks,

infested with drunks
bullying their way down brine-blurred
boulevards between plate-glass salons
and the swinging of early spring
its derelict trees

the city finds me in my room
sitting on the windowsill
staring at April's storms,
thinking and not thinking
of Aggie.

Mmm, yes please. I missed your names, your people.

THE ORIGINAL 17 INCH STORM

it's up to the lighthouse with Stella
dodging rogue waves on the stone staircases
of pacific island reefs, I covet
the spring storms and
warm salt rain

but I've barked at bluer cars,
my nose perked to stranger smells
than bakeries and marinas
in a Wellington explored
by foot, by rain, by wine

in a circuit of sparring storms
I sleep in a tesseract of cloud-spaces
an gravitational singularity of sleepy malachite
eyelashes and irises.