Joshua Corey

FEATURED WORK
• From Severance Songs
• Nectarine

From Severance Songs

Blue the irradiated bones of the trees, filtering light
towards winter. Dawn’s black band blinds
each in her bed, dividing her spine her sword.
Dreamt justice sans law. Dreams swum in her ear,
self-whispering selling seas by the sheershore,
nooned and marooned in water that’s truly blue.
Now a wave. Now horizons lurchingly. Nausea
finds Nausicaa in nakedness, back to a dripping beard.
That terror turning trees into hands, being’s skeletal,
what’s there we know and no. What’s outside is elm,
what’s inner scopes death, shakes its head, scopes again.
A wave. The unmirrored airshed. A woman’s garments
unfurl at the edges of a wind, bearing our look
to carry homewards a piece of ice without a color.

top ^

for Emily on her birthday

“You.” I. Let’s cinema the layers.
A V of geese imprints itself on the sky over the lake.
Let’s freeze it, the sky. Let’s leash it
to these spiked collars as we go about our business
and at midday, chime. I search out the dish of you
winking through the sleet. Across the “years” I found you.
“Waited” for each other. “Marked time” with serrated spools
that teared me plumb and true. Let’s lift icemelt
in gloved hands. Heart of winter water and the ducks, gingerly.
You a third through and me your happy middle,
me a little lost in the furl of your paper thrum.
Oh, “you.” A blue coil, red luminance, sparrows landing
in a birch. Teeming in leafless brawl. Let’s December
the old magenta, let’s petal your uppermost grin

top ^

Nectarine

Between plum and peach the daring the juice peel fuzz stripped bruise styptic order of skin.

Principle organizing arm finds the fish in the wrist. Where the phalanges start strategic withdrawal to funnybone. To biceps the muscles cleaving. That strength.

As color a thin tort as sunset layers the world’s oceanic skin riches are red dust tuning the crosshaired lyre. Not the drain of ice of silver nitrate an Ansel Adams print, William Bliss Baker’s fence snaking an oil in black and white. Nightpregnant aquamarine creeps out the Pacific. Plumskin on tongue costs a short sharp shock.

In the palm fist standing for human heart it’s in your hand always. The heart on a fork to brandish its juice feeding the dust.

Balm of prickly pear by the roadside stand brimming green with heads of lettuce plastic milkcrates the woman brown as dirt joining hands with the scenery.

Arroyo for the showdown walling out our romanticism. Sun’s brief hour in the lubricated gap is garden is an idea of wilderness charged with yellow god

top ^
print this page