Category: Poetry

My mouth gnaws at your bloated
throat, clogged with plastic
straws and drawn-out footnotes.

This sagging jaw, broken by sorry
lovers, wags like a shredded red
flag. If I’m ranting nonsense,

I’m fed up. Lord, please remove
this cup. Inhale this smothering
fog with angelic chants. Release

the panting pups clawing
at your flawed law, jumping
at your heels. What must it be… ...continue reading

Desire closes off
my airway. My girl with her steady hands,
with her art-show nails, with her
little gold necklace she hasn’t taken off in years.
I was passed out in a Paris apartment.
In my dream: two necklaces. A fish and a fish skeleton.
Next day at the fair: fish skeleton necklace. A sign from
the high heavens that,
even though I was feral and rabid-confused,
fate seeked to leash me to her bike rack.

Who could forget our
vomit-speckled Honda civic and her sweet
indifference?
The science museum: the universe condensed
and made molasses so it could slip down
our seven-year-old throats and satiate the mouths that always
breathed out: why and how.

We both yearn for the days of cold, plastic dolls
and synthesized dramatics and finger foods.… ...continue reading

Last night: her first time in a hell I was familiar with,
The love song of the void, the sublimity
Of the open road and the way breath hitches
As the headlights strike. Standing in wait. And the grace
Of the driver and the lack of a collision.
The whole world opened like a peroxided
Wound.

Meanwhile:
I tried to stave off nausea a hangover couldn’t cure.
I paid for my own drink and gave it away.
I walked home: lone soul meandering on
The concrete.
I was shaking and
ragged-breathed like
A shot dog.
Cosmic thread strangled
My finger,
Semi-necrosis a sign from her
The world would soon end.

– AJ Powell… ...continue reading

On this dreadful August day
I knew,
my loyal friend,
my scruffy white shadow,
you’d soon be leaving.

Then the grocery delivery arrived,
forgotten order
left on the stoop
beneath the clearest cyan sky—
and as if to mock me
contained
the season’s most perfect watermelon.

I cut into its flesh,
so flawlessly ripe,
unable to taste its sweetness
or appreciate the pink
that on other days,
would have made me thankful
for such simple pleasures.… ...continue reading

Pain ribbons through my legs, entwines with hamstrings.
She bites and cradles like a vicious lover.
I know all the ways to cleave the ache in half.
My baclofen, tucked away like a prayer:
the last scrap from a past I try to forget. If the need is such, offer me salvation.
The weight released. But I remain splayed out, waiting
To be held again.

I’m fluent in the scripture of medical textbooks:
Spastic dipeligia/lordosis/dorsal rhizotomy is
The silk of my body, is a case study of the effects of
Intracranial hemorrhage is
Selfishness from
Something above me.

– AJ Powell… ...continue reading

My guy is pitched from summer’s throat all blessed and highly favoured.
Like the choir, men who shave pray twice.

First that silver wick against the treeline– he makes a lunch spot out of his jaw, some new place
to give thanks.

The second lives in those wooden stars, twinkling with proof that the sun did press her mouth to
his face and belt.

Oh to be a man and burdened with evidence that somebody loves you. Nerves singing hymnal
while he twists at his flaking skin, snow piling on bathroom tiles.

In the eye of autumn, and with no bruises to press for fun, he takes the love hangover out back
and shows it half the mercy of a man who shaves. The refrain stubbles over.… ...continue reading

In the land of nowhere the man of America is to be found,
in the pieces of nowhere America is to be found,
in the cares of nowhere America is to be found,
yet something is America that is everywhere,
existing in the madness of the grave itself,
but persisting in the sanctity of birth itself,
seeing that America is more than a name,
but an exhalation of one’s fate,
in which one shall be—
damned and loved,
prayed and screwed,
martyred and championed,
killed and crowned,
sought and left,
wept and laughed,
yet this is the land of truth,
whatever truth is,
meaning,
it shall always be—
forever and more,
eternally free.

– Frederick Schardt… ...continue reading