Nathan Parker

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BED LIGHT

Beds collect in the steaming orchards of March—

some wind cracks

& melts the steel-colored springs. Whatever bump

inters itself in these sheets of shoeless silk, I crop,

a long rain whitens the carpets & tightens

arm bones.

Silent under your sure drip,

stamped in blood-pink lip & toe paint, I spread

bright soap into my ears & peer

through car-lit windows, finger a game

of tic tac toe into the fog.

Nextdoor, Papa Smurf-light in the socket,

leg severed, his beard of moths

connected like a nerve.

You waited while they oldwomaned your face,

refining their teeth lightly

along your brain, with whispers as fresh as drops

the windows lick. I meet bugs in the desert only.

I bring a gun & a microphone.

Meanwhile hear them thrum in moons of upper air.

Very soon I will die.

FENCE VIEW

Rice? We've got a few. In front, dumped near

air we pretend to hate for thirty flaky pieces

a month. Then last summer we spooned, slept

in piles of the dust tax, strung the fattened ten,

washed four for the lush evasion (that's what

we thought) & grafted our teeth to jelly, &

wagons of crates, & yum! we will make that

mistake again. Ruined now, we have a flooded

grapenut for a mayor, which is exactly a full

stomach for a bug or housefish, it is also an

agreement: I don't kick, it's true, but I've bent

to primp young sisters so moot from loneliness,

dish-marsh, & turkeysleepydrug, their white hands

baste in stomped grapes just to touch me accurate.

THE NICKELS

There are so many now, planked over the hallways, owning and closing

their walls like months. The courtyard kite

is failing, and still many argue, ankleshaped on the torn blanket, the sudden punts,

raining around

the crapping patient, settling in ditches against paper fronts.

We've been missing this,

you've been wrapping their clean guts, you've teased none. How the banging

keeps grip

at the bed. Now they curl lispily, a ripe foam worshipping someone's burned toes,

listing and paddling,

the patience of their wash laughing at so many crowds of cars. You can foist it,

that wet well,

onto lovely arms, expunging surgery-sweat,

riding empty lawn chairs

to the freezing brace of the sea of bed. They are hatching from scratched tops,

planted on riding mowers you hear once in a while in the dark,

pressing and pausing with new names for dust and rib—you can harm it,

the liquid whip,

the dance of waiting, as they rap and jip

and lose without any regret,

a blush swaddling the head, burying fists into every person in every place.