Just This Side of Savage
I am holding my brother’s arm.
I am holding still like you said.
—Joshua Marie Wilkinson
1.
All these old tires
Burning in my glass paranoia
Of the town where I grew up!
& what I paint
Is the Bishops’ queer sunset
Come to visit my brother & me
Its star-lit grave
A barking shadow
Of something like a precipice
A voice calling out
By the old xenophobic staircase
Where I’d run down
Pressing my luck
Shattering a spell in the room
My brother reading there
Quietly
2.
The oracle
Who once deboned me
Like a trout—
Her three hearts beating the air to death—
Now serves something wild to the men by the door
Says yesterday she saw
Gasoline flowing from her flowers
Into blogs
A woman murdered
Just this side of
Townshend
These Flakes Falling thru Us
1.
He who belly flops
Into bombed-out pools
Is labeled
A kid in history
Having his day
No one thing
Is interrogative
As this kid
All winter long
He was pensive
About April
Flakes falling thru him
Like lucid ideas
Lost in translations
Of what will
Become of us
2.
In big toe
Dead chica
Montana
We gather
To eat
The shimmer
Of a threat
Gone cold
On our plates
Sheaves
Of 19th Century
Sentences
We glimmer
In risk
We are little
Kittens
Of sisters
Playing
Without
Hearts