Forklift, Ohio

 

When you try to make a joke

in a bank

it falls flat

there’s an armed guard

standing there

wearing sunglasses indoors

motionless

but no one laughs

in fact my intentions

are misunderstood

no, no, I am just

going to walk out

the door and come back in

to turn my coins

into paper money

fifty-three dollars

in the sunshine

I’m on my way

with my jacket

in my backpack

and the steel

grates over the pubs

early afternoon

my step as high

as the starlings

bickering in the sky

the birdsong

of the city

and the paper lifting off

the sidewalks

goodbye, I wish

the world were different

 

 

 

Said, find us, alignment

could well mean

please, find us. Control is not

for me. To learn from

all kinds of music! What harm

could be had. The multitudes of

secret handshakes. High hopes

kill every time. Dangerous

accumulations and mistakes

in the weather. I never

saw such a broken in window

but last night it was a yellow

car. The mechanic gets

laid why he smells like that.

We have no control. The screens

bad enough for Japanese

ladybugs. This Land. Where

else is the weather such a

conversation where else does the

weather sound so much

like this. Prophets of a square of a

land this big. They say, big sky go

south and west, they say water, pick your

best hand, drive that way they say, moose

and you would be so lucky

they say corn maze, you say how

high they say Jell-O you

say pretty how beautiful

I could eat this every day. The

apartment, the apartment. The

floor is failing  by the slippers’ count.

O kind fixtures O sweet

light. To have guests to

put it out. Weather make

me talk less weather say the

lovelies. In the dining room it was cloudy

with a dew point of blue flowers.

Said Come Over to the arm chair, won’t

you. What else could I have

said to the shower. The airplanes

audible. What kind of forecast.

What a picture this is becoming.

Shapes are difficult to speak of.

Shiny protective material. Tiny little

mishaps. Quiet! Quiet riot in the city.

Good for you. I read some journals too, but the odds of actually finding this poem can’t be good. Thanks for making the effort. I hope you feel like it was worth it.

She hit a boy

with a shovel

in a barn.  She

saw nothing

but the math

of it.  Ascent,

arc, intersect.

And the shapes:

triangle on oval

in a sun-drowned

pentagon.

A thing in motion

tends to stay. She

hit a boy.  She

grew up to list

numbers in files

in pale rooms

full of dustless

air.  She wears

nice clothes.

She wears

nice clothes.

 

June is a better girl than July.

June has chipmunks

whereas July has black squirrels

in a graveyard. June has centrifugal force,

careening outward into the space

of all spaces, a room

full of delicate chaos. The briefest reprieve

from order, that June.

The smallest oxymoron.

July is a nutshell and cloying and wants

to stay close to home.

July is also a whirlpool.

But she doesn’t know it.

July is dangerously close to spinning out

in a race from the center.

But she doesn’t know it.

No one told her that physics doesn’t

really exist, that force is just a name

we give to our own laziness,

that circles are just confused

straight lines. No one told July

about the blackness beating in her heart.

No one told July that her body

is not in a box, it is the box.

While June sits over the grave,

happy little campsite,

July suffocates on the particulates.

Some boys were playing baseball in the yard. A woman went out into the yard and was reaching for cherries. The batter threw back the bat and accidentally hit her on the head. She dropped dead at the same moment the child was born. On the girl’s head there was a bald spot with red skin in the shape of a baseball bat. Storks bring cherries. Cherries eaten by a cat will cause fits. Cherries in the house come from dust. A friend is slain every time you eat a cherry, or ejaculate.

 

Out of longing, you rowed into the horizon,

dented it in fact.  Cringe.  The brain shrinks

at such responses the gulls give the sea,

the sea gives itself, a discourse we

are always on the outside of, even drowning.

Oh, you said known world, not gnome world.

That makes all the difference or I wish it would

but I suspect it’s just a matter of magnification,

whether the mite be giant monster

or the great calamity of an orange-ade spill.

In the meantime as it always is

except in childhood when it’s too early

or always too late, in the meantime

I remain ornament to the miniature

golf course, subterfuged with rain.

The tricky part is how life dissolves

to tics relieved every now and then

by seizures, anemones of light spiking

from your head, a voice from the clouds

plenty loud yet you the only one to notice,

unrepentant truant that you are, sprung,

at large.  Take me with you next time,

okay?  I promise not to tattle.

 

They haven’t been filled in yet. His hat

is empty. No faces. Someone drew them

from behind. A family or a magazine.

They are Ohio. Flat. Heavy machinery

in the foreground. Their hair is solid black

which means their clothes are white.

White and thin as paper. Between front and back

there is some poetry. Sometimes. And fiction too.

Beside them someone wrote the number 13.

This does not mean they are unlucky. Only that

it is summer. They are dressed accordingly.

Perhaps their ankles are cold. There is a son,

a daughter.  I could be making this up. For sure

the sky is blue— it always is in black and white.

And her hair is long. She is the mother. They live

in a small apartment with no dishwasher. This does

not necessarily refer to them. They are a family that

knows how to operate heavy machinery safely.

Maybe they are dead. But this is Ohio— a family,

a forklift— it is hard to say.