by Douglas Blazek

Contesting never–perfected effort,
poetics, pivoting
affinity’s prescience,
quibbles its riveting
scribble of shifting rifts.
How worthwild this writing
customizing cliches
with a knife’s original lips!
How such flourish
zeals the plush read of petulance
to pet the real!
Yet words, far avant
their curriculum vitae,
alter us not from ape to starlight
but to a seethed pastiche
pitching its ingredients
as god’s hot topics.
And so this force,
sovereign in its gnosis, corrosive
to our thesis, keeps
phallusing a pregnant ghost
birthing our mouth’s
impersonation of the world
openly buried in a spoken grave.

by Douglas Blazek

I drag these bones over
rocks to a spot
to fold their hollow
into a hole.
Here I shovel.
Here I lower.
Here I dirt their gall.

They are strife.
Despite disguise.
I describing I.
Strife.

My eyes fill with grave lice.
Finally nothing is annihilated.

Everywhere: siteless
parasites, cite–by–cite, digest
the paradise of light.

Neural in a universe of nerves,
reality–infested lexia
nibbles its underpinnings.

Aftermaths of autopsy:
story wardrobing story.
A vernacular taxidermist
stuffing a mummy’s vocabulary
with ventriliqual words.

How the earth is heard.

by Douglas Blazek

Thought, its exhaust
from use, from astute appetite,
pollutes by bite’s pursuit
circuitously prophetic

pathetically indemic
in endless deadends
wooing a sphere pure
as the perimeter
of earth without world.

Riveted little wreckages
lip–written bridges
ventriloquially re–steeling
skeletal debris
repeating speaking’s
eavesdropping echo
tectoning a vow
no knowledge knows.

Ubiquity’s blueprint,
disheveled panoramically
as blackprint’s pathology,
revs a roadmap’s despotic
copy neologically ahead.
Red’s stoplight never read.

by Gordon Taylor

Each day after solstice, afternoon light increases
by a minute. He explains the year’s shortest day
is the same length as the others. We want a reason
for our sadness. We should just admire night instead,
he insists, in his home of barometers and chairs,
the neck of every reading lamp broken and swinging,
dust on a herd of small, jade elephants facing a window.
Twenty years ago, I hid in my late teenaged bedroom,
waited for his snoring from across the hall before
sneaking out to meet other boys in the buzz of streetlamps.
He still granted a weekly allowance and told me what
to buy. Chocolate. Something sweet and worthy.

My mother confesses he stood on a bridge in his fifties
and considered jumping but stopped himself. I knew
he hid hunting rifles under the stairs, but I was too shy
to search for weapons. He says a cot is unfolded
in the guest room so my husband will have a place
to sleep too. In a leather navy recliner, I listen to a tale
of his first date with my mother, movie theatre
deep kiss interrupted by an usher’s flashlight, lines
of empty seats underlined by aisles. I sit next
to his fireplace, in the twilight in between, watching
helpless wood pocked by thousands of tiny red bites,
a green chenille throw, moss over my knees.