The Brooklyn Rail

APRIL 2020

All Issues
APRIL 2020 Issue
Poetry

Love Mountain


where the glossed ground rots
toward the listing cloud
shaped like my face when it’s
vitreous and arrested and


hot for you
on the yoga mat
doing high kicks
toward the dust of our day


it pushed through my body
higher octave planetoids
pooled their light against the junk
of the yard and shot the rays into


what i broke
when my face turned up
then sloped
toward you on the mountain


we made an eerie warmth
whose emissions were shareable
we announced it as love and love
was a decaying house


an edge taken in an edge
hemmed to rip then an edge
folded into the center and strangle-
held by your thighs


we even sang a song about
their prowess yr meaty thighs
cops were there
a gray kitten was there


a girl in a zebra mask chased me
up the hill screaming i drove down
head out the window vomiting weeds
black as the void of course


black as the spine
of the book resting between
pages of the other book
splayed then bracketed


edited my pulse fluttering
inside my thigh near the joystick
made vexingly arrhythmically hot
in the image of your stronger ones


bitched myself out for eating
again poisonous weeds in the yard
for transpiercing the void of course
splayed then contained in the bile


of the dark book
good book
the other god
good god


the mountain expropriated
what i'd fashioned for myself
in pyroclastic bursts made me
torpid so that all i could do was


all i could do was


exhale into the crocheted blanket
wordless untrackable unperturbed
save for weathers and always
felicitously abducted and crotched


and crouched in commune brine stale cigs
heard myself annoyingly talking about
transmutation and nightly we christened
we nightly christened love mountain


i could handle it and/or i wanted it
i read from the incunabulum of your belly
from my own then found a vessel to settle
X’d you out a veracious hex sign called me by name


MY NAME


but then ran back
i always ran back
i’m sick of talking about this
fell ill inside the grid like everyone else


cops were there
kittens were there
everyone dressed in grey
eating plated piles of the yard


before together heaving it up
by the light of the full moon
we showered and watched the runoff
we forsook the containers and clothes


then ran back to each other
unboxed uncaked
rabbits bounded up the hill
howling at the moon before


turning into deer
got loosed from the ground
torrid as the sun lacquered the moon
the ultra-modern home next door


had no décor but on purpose like we got
charged by ambiance alone superglossed
and salivating into moonlit dirt LISTEN
I’M SICK OF SPEAKING


I WILL NO LONGER SPEAK
OF MY OLDEN DEPLETIONS
it’s to do with being more of a majuscule
heavy metal lettered machine-drawn thing


like a cluster of shrapnel that could break
the mount and less of whatever mound
of feminine flesh i am or more simply
like you


or you


cat piss incense burnt toast but festooned
i didn’t want to hurt the moon nor you
the moon nor you but now that i really
think of it now that i think of the top


of love mountain where the grown cats
rested at your feet eyeing me with such
self-possession i must have begged you
to keep some light for yourself but also


to give some here


and also ration it so that i might
remain always arrested
that’s the eerie prayer that loops
may i may i may i may i


remain always kind of arrested


amen
8:39pm


a heap of druggy light showed the way
to the spine of the sea where i went fissiparous
so that i like schools of miniature fishes
dispersed my parts


i woke up in Rome
sybaritic as ever
in a lux hotel suite
with a new version of you


teeth or the moon shining in my face
as if we weren’t just on Love Mountain
at the edge of Pennsylvania getting quietly
arrested by twin cops for our nudity


no cat piss no incense


we ate pears beside Rome’s ruins
we forgot our organs and so were gods
chewing on each other and dried pears
like ears in the hemisphere


like ears of the hemisphere
LISTEN I’M GOING TO BE OKAY
LISTEN I WENT RIBALD AND FERAL
SLAMMED MYSELF DOWN


PUT ME AWAY
COULDN’T FIND THE HEAVY
INSTRUMENTS NECESSARY
TO DISPERSE MY ONENESS


AND SO MERGE WITH YOU
i went below the horizon and blew
i blew into the pear
your ear


also the Roman ruins
   and three books by Bataille
   also menstrual blood gum oatmeal and a hound dog
   also everything nutritive about light
   and light which livers and strings
   and the luculent dropouts on the mountain


Italian hotel like a horizon i’m going under
dissolving the western margin
and so merge with you
captor


sweat gland of the pear
into which i dwindle
i didn’t like your infrastructure
mentally, i mean


but like an apocalypse party
it was sexy
peanut butter on my fingers
fat glossing my hands


too slippery for the ruins
and mutably woman meaning
i understood my essential value
to be lesser than or equal to


your more abiding leverage
which emanated a beastly light
to which i got easily magnetized
and by which my body shook


it shook with capitulation
to your most basic gems
which some people found boring
which sometimes i found boring


effluviums of brine cigarettes
and body odor that would come to
unfortunately and gravely
forever turn me on


9:19pm

close

The Brooklyn Rail

APRIL 2020

All Issues