LEMON PERFORATION

And am never but will be

Redacting simplicity a little

Envious of the diagnosis consoled

A covenant of fire escapes

Siamese legalese taped to the wall

The severance from weaponized lulls

Comforters softenered shoulders in snow

The resolution discolored

Beneath twenty protective folds

This city makes hair custody

A consecutive liquidation of bandwidth

Overpasses the cold cold

Tenements without precedence

Searching for a location

That doesn’t feel like parole

‡

THE FEELINGS OF THE TOWER

Nine-volt battery tongue

Plastered over the river

I wet with sorrow saw el Draco

Ending near the middle

As fake purple voices truth

Lies somewhere in the shadows

The veering back to venousness

Always felt like November

For the rapture of alfredo

Matter a constellation of vulnerable

Pokeweed eating hogs

Short-circuits a tornado

To relive my rightful crest

Rewind to chimeric personal features

Then dream beyond the archipelago

‡

WAVE TRANSLATOR

Alluvial cradles the bay

Leaves laughter at the battered

Partitions embracing an algorithm

A drone scans the near pink

Of grief comes anemones

Not clipped the printout of the aneurism

Repined all in an island wet walks

No hone after home

To preserve the delta rhythms

Sonar geysered note the voider

Loosening the ability to fight

Abstract nouns cutout for a prism

The fog cutter turned off the weather

Inside me I unglued money

From nervousness with some chrism

‡

GRAVE

Born from teeth the month detected me

I snowed every state a different shape

In the chimney my weird speaks

Too many tongues have bit it the comb

My only relic from the middle

Bronze ages an unforgettable patina

Leftovers from anger shape fertility

From the region of summer

You warm this life that retreats

Like the blisters I waded into

From the breast milk I’m sick with

Preferring to stay in the dream

Primrose faculties under the trees

The other side of the mirror calm isn’t free

Stars full of disgrace also weep

‡

[            ]

negotiating the threshold

with my headquarters

towards the prairie’s

deep continual —

I mouthed the bed

of the lake                                          the eel’s

completed figure                         biting

his own tail into zero

then with nothing left

at the summit but wind

undercuts and a valley

of blood and periwinkle

I thinned       time eats

his children

in finely placed

unremarkable blows

: : : : :

SHANE ANDERSON is the author of Etudes des Gottnarrenmaschinen (Broken Dimanche Press) and STALL (co-written with Elvia Wilk, KTBAFC). Other work and translations can be found in 6x6, Edit, Asymptote, Hilda, the playbill for Matthew Barney's “River of Fundament” (Skira Rizzoli) and elsewhere. Poems included above will be published in SOFT PASSER (Mindmade Books) in June 2015.