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