Stan Mir
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“A market of bacilli large in the breeze.”
–Anonymous
1.
In the Lacustrine
Period where all we did was swim I knew
you had a shrapnel
heart rusting in your chest held
together by pins. Canaries
spun in the shallows.
Goggle-faced, bright blurs were your eyes.
Fortunate
fins. I was five
phantoms deep. Stars mutilate
the heavens as birds
move ancient and hope to coup.
The myth of you is true: rising,
like a totem, your side
pierced, all this color
and belief from the harpoon’s
wound, oxygen in your
gills with a beak.
2.
There is something happy about apocalypse,
the world-combed
roughage
of cars, a tender
abdomen skyline evacuates.
There’s some thing an end wants
so much as to destroy
the daily husk:
Ensconced, 1616, in the Narragansett blood,
Small Pox set their pores sailing.
Decimated bodies riddle the veranda of the
New
rising in the dermis,
some breaking
fully into blossom. The
anemic president
gesticulates
cash nowhere to be
found.” I, a shadow, saw
in the sand
continental collapse.
3.
Age 2, encephalitic, tremor in the trees,
my brain swollen,
numberless, abstract.
In the diction of paradise beg it be
Nothing Nothing Nothing
To the times I’ve pushed my nose, watch
news scroll, savage
servility, still greased,
slides by, offends
cloister-sight, it dilates,
a visible darkness
floods this shallow hole.
The offer on the market: Yellow Rain on
everyone’s
house. Eyes, doctors orders, brought
by injection, blue.
*
Arrest.
Pulmonary Rain.
Reification.
*
An undiscovered anagram denotes an end to
what
we thought had begun
with disobedience.
4.
I must shroff
into parts, lest the officials
catch on, my wings, be they false, my wings,
be they genuine, are
they not the ones your
accomplices sent for, they
fail only when a bird
is struck from the
bough by the fraudulent
carnivals of our heads,
never when a ferris wheel
rolls anxiously on do we
stop counting for the day
to be done, I cradle
the charges my vision is
failed in the pouch
beneath my beak, the correspondence
says I am free, says I
am captive, private and
property in the banks of
the lake.
5.
Boats, ballast,
birds. Birds. Ballast.
Boats. We have boats, no ballast. Birds
burning in the wood.
Wormwood and echo in throats. Fever’s
effigy placed in the bow
we cast this canoe burning.
6.
I, disguised as your
mouth. Watch, I
organize your feelings.
Success in circuit
lies. Row, Row my Boat
In
the yard flags fluctuate. Stalagmites
& -tites. Variably, I have
said who
I
am, who did this construction.
Fever. Whoever it was was Fever,
a carnival, a seizure. Whatever
a vacuum is it holds
what it likes.
Like the lady
holding the moon by its
strings. I’ve forgotten
the rime. Sailor:
7.
Dear Birds, Winter
On my
best days I see Disease as a street-bound
yellow flower, which
regrets. Somewhere Pacific the
canoe becomes ashen,
extrapolates. Fever equips
himself with gills, takes
a bow, & moves his cabaret
into the sea. Encore!
Encore! Then your beaks
harpoon the necks of the
false quisling fish. Next
Fever’s rising
& totem. O inoculation you have failed!
Yours,
S