Preface to the Obvious
In the beginning there was hope and in the next beginning there was the vast metallic plain. Then nothing but vicious constellations with brilliant teeth.
Canis major, stalker Orion.
Dear Hunter, the impossible
distance between names and lights. Johnny the Apostle said an open mouth is what started it all. So jot it down. “Unmanifest” he might have said could he have signified.
Dear Broken Column, the people
laced up their brightly-colored shoes and into these have placed their embalmed intentions. Missing posters hung themselves from the disgrace of it all.
The mouths of the animals opened under neon,
swallowed every node of the Dog Star and shat pixilated tide charts. Sharp crudities gouged into soft furry surfaces.
This is where the goddess came in.
Dear Sir or Madam Firebrand, in the beginning was
the dayglow mythbird. She invited the Major to break her tether, and together they gagged and snuffed Orion the rapist, him begging a certain famous ambiguity.
She taped it, uploaded, counted slick
towers of hits. She harnessed scorpions to her flaming chariot, and they glowed under blacklight.
Dear History, I am one of them.
Waved a stinging organ that stands for exactly what you think it does. I sparked, in other words. Signified.
We travelled into everything,
arrived perfectly but in pieces, and dripping. This, she said, calls for a ritual, a cerebration!
Dear Shorn Beast, the animals are asking what it
all means.
Said she, let’s just come right out and say it.
Preface to Salivation
Mild unction
or extreme mortality can manifest fangs. I vampirize myself in flatscreen with these boorish milk teeth. Eye teeth. I seethe burningly, trundle flat-backed and inbred out from under my heritage.
Obedience climbs
my elbow, hooks onto my architecture from a twist of its straight-legged splits. Never spit-fire, less oil rig than spigot, less derrick than divine human pet, tended and groomed by one good book or other. Armature unhinges along the spine and gnaws at its joints with a terrific jaw.
Preacher said six
wings there were: two and two and two, and this was called a sermon. This was hard-backed petitioning for new eyes (with teeth), the better my dear to bless you with, to piece you with two wings over your eyelets, pinking shears jabbering on along your selvage.
I’m leaning in
closer to hear what you’re hymning about, cocking my good ear, shaking my tags to wake the jangling chorus in your wreck. The wear of wings is a ratty paper cutting, a torn skin.
The original toothless horror
show, blue-blooded smutty as ancient clans of butchers and weavers, soaked through from wet centuries’ counting of bones and boiling of shrouds and biting of hands. Coming and coming unto us, omg.