Williams April 27th

Painted Bomb

This disassembled sketch

of your sickness dream: me

in crowbar regalia, your horsefly

regatta & the space between

our bones. We marauder our

worries on the paper, charcoal

& crucifix, grief crucible.

Call it a mural. Call it an illicit

marking on the back of our skulls,

a weeping lesion. A legion prepared

to devil our insides, trick our cartilage

to turn against itself. The wisest among

us know that paper dissolves in any hard

rain. We know that an echo is always

preceded by a noise, a hostage gurgle,

a troop of black statistics.

Williams April 26th

Brute Calligraphy

My sluggish lifeline dogcarts my hand, traces

the ink spreading across my palm. The oracle

measures the debacle, writes an open

letter to the scimitar pharmacies. We are sick

of your barren & listless caches, your sleepwalker

phenomenons. The sun falls & we assemble

our battalion of cadavers, our platoons of ligaments

& cadence, bronze medalists & found battleships.

Our desolate army with our steady diet of wormbread

& fermentation, we mongrel through the mud, look at

the scars fevering through our hands. We arrive at your holy

sites, prepared to plunder & pillage. Our arrival has been spelled

out in the ravaged cloth spun around our shoulders, spun

right down into the snow & the dirt. The tattered flags attached

to your outpost won’t the story. We won’t leave any mouths to seed

the soil, no soil to seed the sky.

Kristin April 25th

Pages

I never liked ending on an odd page

This town taught me to count by tens

I think of 80, 90, 30

As though the numbers were only cars driving

by my house

sometimes red,  sometimes white, sometimes trucks,

sometimes returning

I felt a quiet sort of presence in my throat

like a mouse had tunneled in

like it had been speaking this whole time

Kristin April 24th

Poem from Behind Mask of an Egg

We carried the hay yellowed

and warm. The herons held on.

with them we crept vertically.

Endeavored as the north star.  

we sleep little,

cramped and impoverished.

No language could explain

the best place for war

or a reason. Gray chickens

swallow the same pebbles

in the barnyard

over and over.

Kristin April 23rd

Notes Before Leaving

the way my pollution

is unending

how entering you

never amounted

to anything

the miles we walked,

scowling, looking

for a cock fight

the unending

process of birth

to handshake

or spit sharp

on the ground

there are many

possibilities

and many other times

I’ve spent thinking

of other men

Williams April 25th

False Flag

the elder reaches out,

sanctifies his wish

to colonize his

decrepitude—my little red

book of awe takes note

of his request, begins

constructing the ledger

that will hold sway

for generations. His mouth

turns down at the corners

as he fingers the quill, thumbs

the parchment. His mutterings

are dead & unintelligible. He points

at the sky, aledark & angry, then

himself, then at the infrastructure

of caves in the mountains behind

us. I nod, take out my redness,

circle all the items he has forgotten about.

Kristin April 22nd

I'm a lime
Or maybe not

I can't imagine a job
I don't have, can't find the thing
in my purse

I should still be functioning
as a legend

The reasons I do things are not
For fun

I require skills

My sister is a necessity,
a bonded medal,
a reconception of space

I turn on a sign when



Hello ground