Moony Wednesday
It’s the kind of day
when I take a muscle relaxer
and photoshop myself into Versailles.
I’ve got two dry-erase markers
with a filthy doodle ready
to emerge from them
and Gabe won’t respond
to the links I sent him. Roll around
in an office chair, take a video,
unbutton just the top.
Even inside Versailles, Louis XIV
smelled bad and had an anal fistula.
I looked it up, and let me tell you this:
Do not do that. Save yourself
the image, the image isn’t so dire.
Words are always enough.
Among friends and notfriends
I have tried recently to what I call
cultivate an aura of menace.. .As in,
Around myself tonight, I’m cultivating
a teacherly aura of menace. Stomp
between the desks, sneer and leer.
I ask a student what the sight of
a full moon means to her. I say it seems
menacing. She says she sees it cold,
lonesome, all askew, nothing like the sun king.
Ghost Gun
There should be a word for me
like the British have a zed for z
some term for what of thought is real
and not a spook. There should be a
phantom strike, a flop that no one
balks at, a skinwalk shed of copy
and concealed. Sometimes I worry
I’m a ghost gun, fired without number
into every spirit passing on the street.
Sometimes I’m flensed, flayed of freight,
afraid and late, a sometimes itch,
a two-days’ growth of stubble on
my brain.
What’s the word for fog that freezes as it
brushes on your windshield,
an aunt who wore strings of pearls
white like polished rice?
I hear the crackle of new packaging
the whisper of carbonation
and each of you I see is a serial
number away from a weapon.
James Butler-Gruett's writing has been published in Poetry London, DIAGRAM, the Millions, HAD, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Arizona MFA program, he teaches creative writing in York, NE. Find him on Twitter @etinarcadia3go.