All My Friends
measuring myself against photographs of
people who look brushed against the grain of
their own travails like they know how to play
the piano not so much intuitively but with an
ear for watery sounds like car horns in the rain
or the natural reverb of public restrooms and
then later after it gets dark we play one together
on a tarp laid out beneath us really a chord
organ she taught me to play like an ape to repeat
scraps of choruses to scrape together and
get by on nothing in a systematic way that involves
discipline only what the body wants at a certain
point the laughter is suspended to set the whole
machine on fire lay down and self-immolate…
Avalanche
it’s just as easy to be broken to be disappeared like air into other air fire into other fire water into other water and so on—these are the memories of last rites given from when we were allowed to die at home and then buried under an avalanche of little lord Jesus the altar or mantle made up with decorations of Him in all his oneiric forms no one fed on peaches alone or almonds or even vermin we stopped the truck to chase wild turkeys into the brush sliced the lamb’s belly green as spring spurting running onto our hands and feet and then we hung a goat from a tree took off its skin shared him as the gods do with the rain not pausing for a second to reflect on Guernica or other symbols of plague overtaking the atlas
Antelope
was that an atomic disaster or just
the sun reflecting off the windows of a train
I am on the toilet reading about obscure saints
I thought you'd be coming in the dead
of night like a fractal or ghost
but there's quite a few moments of daylight left
she asked why are you taking that lighter into
the garage with you that's how marriages end
and I put something pastoral on something
with feathers instead of a skin I learned to play
the guitar sometime between Bush stealing
the election and 9/11 around the time I was
writing the abortion story I have everything in
milk crates from then it's all in pink ink (the
cheapest I could find) someone needs to
write the history of nostalgia from stranded
soldiers to the end of men and then sketch the
moon and its oceans for me or maybe just its
phases from dark navy to the most pathologically
intense neon (or the other way around) no
one knows why I'm like this once the men in
my family put a gun into my ear like I was
the antelope hung my body over the Colorado
river it's vein of blood red sand opening
bright like the creation of continuous time
Bryan D. Price's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Posit, the UCity Review, Diagram, Oxidant | Engine and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego with his wife, a dog, and a cat named for Pina Bausch.
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