We won’t cold brew malaise. I melted a safety cone and caulked the quadruple pane. Coupons are falling!
Dishes don’t wash themselves. I kept reminding the pilots to not slap at the dog when he began to squirm
and bark. Don’t let the dog use your inhaler as a chew toy. Inhalers belong in shirt pockets, co-pilot. Don’t
chip contact lenses. Abruptly recoil from sound. Some can make glasses break with a single tone. At the time
you trip on the stairs, instinctively put your arms forward. Close eyes, close mouth, close nose, close
Windows on the World. The slenderest glasses are always the hardest to clean. Hot water is best for assam
and arabica: when the neighbors are yelling you don’t go down. You know those kids playing baseball
might break a window. That kid will pay, the one in the stained blazer. He’s really full of himself. Caught
nothing but air in T-ball. Wear orange shirts to the continental breakfast. Launch the buffet out the window.
Get a running start and push as hard as you can. Shoot that fucker right out the window. Laugh! Just imagine
the hash browns and eggs and bacon falling onto a crowd below. They looked up and laughed! Waved,
flipped you off. Flip them back in good nature and chuckle. Who is going to wash all these goddamned
mimosa glasses? There’s always the weekend, push and pull the remaining carts. Tatter your dress tie into
a pinwheel and spin it like a helicopter. These people don’t know how to fall, tumbling blindly through updrafts.
Jonathan Briley
Heidelberg
While I was driving past the demolition of the Heidelberg Brewey today I noticed something written on the wall.
http://blog.thenewstribune.com/business/2011/01/12/heidelberg-brewery-complex-slated-for-demolition/
[Update, 12/18/11: The wall and this art piece no longer exist.]
Hylebos Creek
starliner buried underground
near darker dermis, ivory headpiece
ashtray on the dashboard
toy strata, solemn strata, lower dismal strata
found refracted eviction
roofing theropoda lifelike
inside red flyer wagon, encased fossil
furcula at an angle, glass case gelatin
turn microscopic. sample the windows of the bus
record etched channels where clothing seams imprinted
measure indented clay where resting used to be
leave microscopic. overall spine and pelvis, outside the bus
overall complete jaw, no missing teeth
wedded firmly to rock
coelurosaur without cage, freed pet
formica strata’s bouncing tacks
metal hill one click away, twenty stories tall
rusted less on the interior
thicker panes some bodies disintegrated against
Pierce County transit bus, inside, along
the yard where kindling was free to burn
on scrap steel, windows sagged free
late under three hundred feet of pressure
through and through, compacted steadily
air is granite. mom and dad strung silk
from flashing lights on the dashboard
filled an old tunnel beneath the city
lariat chromed and buried
a silent wick for a Ford
ash rumors
Three types of water fowl
were found in the fireplace this morning.
Their necks slipped from our numb palms
buttered with soap. –Get empty cereal boxes
to corral them on the hearth.
Wash them.
Three types of birds come back from the printer.
Feathers prefer woodcuts or calligraphy.
Our black hole likes to attract
hippocampus and altercation.
A sedan’s interior spackled with crushed PM.
A pet listens from inside the model PT boat box.
–Tamiya Modelling
A pet scratches from inside the Datsun trunk.
A pet found a perch on a new pelvis.
A pet eats lichens under the front porch park.
A pet chews at its own hang nails.
When the nightstand gets wet napkins are not useful
for schematics. Circuitry embeds in flesh,
mold spores, event horizons, ash dermis.
Circuitry persists in the ignition of hardwoods.
Several pets returned to fly
around the pilot light. Several pets
found the center of the galaxy, Andromeda, Ursa Minor.
Several pets happened upon a nearby war.
Be tidy for the one in the bicorne–
spot the shellac on the unreal figure.
Make new pets; collect cauliflower
for our taxidermist to use as stuffing for a brain–
South Tacoma Memorization
we flew up into the trees
to tie knots in collected red wires
we flew back down to where we were born
in a green ammo can from the army surplus store
we returned again to the swap meet
where Vietnam vets peddling circuit boards have been replaced by immigrants
we flew into a downspout the television cable is now drilled through
we looked at spider webs inside a hollow gray beehive
what is a simpler home than a discarded beehive? what does rent cost
to make your home inside a retired gray husk
felled from dormer eaves and held in a popsicle hand–
she ran up to you, holding the hive, hands sticky
then showing her in the garage, this is how you clean a revolver
and, can you look at these parts and know how to put it back together?
the old convenience store a block away is now a trap house
where our Brittany Spaniel was once tethered to its steps during a walk
the old banks of a neighboring curb have been graded under
no longer my bike ramp; power lines hang the same
C130s have the same noise with landing gear down
flying over mowed lawns back to their base
exhaust settles the same on southern facing roofs
and we fly back into trees
near the center of a retired cemetery
near no new dormers being hung
near no new holes being dug
noble gas, noble beast
printed over a dollar’s hieroglyphs.
printed on our molars, on our enamel.
printed on credits from Ursa Minor,
on our hang nails, our rooted crowns.
who’s there?
recorded anonymous on debit card mag stripes.
printed on one knuckle of a zoo’s prized nobility:
- skin cells of the swimming lake
- latitude
- misery dew point; wipe your upper lip on a plaid work shirt
- longitude
- boiling point; waxen bough too slippery to grip
- x-axis
- fist full of pumice; caress the face of one sleeping
- y-axis
- palms cupped broken windshield yellow jackets
- disorienting gravities
- drawer of slack wire with no frets to be glued on a balsa neck
- tons, chords
- skin cells in the wash basin
- cubic feet
- the smell of silk burning, ink burning on newsprint; linen thrown over a sleeping face
- kimono angstroms
- quartz, barbacoa, 1986 NASA
- Fahrenheit
- on the lake: transposed Santa Maria against skyscrapers
- knots
- terminal velocity
steady there, steady
with a carbine for the collateral.
who’s there?
the onion farmer– lunar trap in tears;
recycled potatoes on the half shell.
recycled helium lugged by its broker
keep her nose away from matches–
breathe without smiling around the corner.
douse the silicon burning near Digital Dakota barley;
track a gunpowder nose to its matchbook
gather around the noble beast converting to gas;
its hide inflated, tethers on hooves holding it down.
the laughter, the murmurs, the exertion, the economics–
human brain, stomach pump, exaltation–
who’s there, who knocks so long?
balloonist thimbles of dividends
helium taxidermy. eat from the mastodon for three months
but leave its shell intact, make it air tight to be inflated
for flights above Pangaea
— like us, floating upwards
towards a suspension bridge with sacks of coins;
rosy child recursions; spleens of dinars, lungs of rupees,
livers of nascent yen
pull out every last tooth;
who’s there?
cage a word behind clenched gums, the trapped moth, our fetus
tuxedoed for self-immolation, hollow and still;
a coin inserted between ribs to eject its toy–
christen the kicked stack of silver dollars;
long in the tooth, one continent split.
long in the hair, the division of an umbilical cord.
the rapid heartbeat, the slot machine, the oblong rapist;
the blown out candle in Lincoln’s bedroom
Io
- nursery arrhythmia, kitchen shivers
- protect hemoglobin from live wires
- ancient salt cakes the embryo
- the necrophiliac next door prefers white bread
- able mistletoe, a compass traces the arc of spasms
- pet tarantulas bed in moss
- lip wounds split open
- costume cherubims, cracked telescope cell walls
- lichens, rites of waxen attics
- temples all day. smile as you play
- temple’s magnate, conglomerate
- wounds hesitate to merge, coagulate
- merge with the bath water
- merge with the bird feeder’s squatter
- merge with the bird bath’s water
- merge with a dental dam’s failure
- merge with esquire on sand pyres
- merge a livery horn with a cup
- merge soil with hounds
- merge metal with palates
- merge with the bird house’s spider
- lacquer canisters, colostrum
- the pelvic merged with the gastric
- sliced leather livers into shoe soles
- the pyre can’t burn leather livers
- we fire walk the pyre on liver slices
- we fire walk the esquire of the temple
- we fire walk atop WTC 2
- the pilot light is awake
- the pilot light is the first to ignite the hive
- i see terrible things for black widows nearby
- i see terrible things for axes swung against soft hides
- i see terrible things smashed against linen
- i see some figments banished to Io
- opal figurine, matter’s obsolescence
- fires in the history stable
- fires on the genealogy records table
- fires in the bunk below red shift
- fire ants will float in plumes on water
- fire from the gym teacher’s scotch
- so soft, the isosceles drawn under flowers
- so soft, the prunes within
- so soft, the eagle’s breast in dark matter
- so soft, each polyp burned under eclipse
- so elegant, chauffeurs tending to tripwire
the third estate
someone decided we would have the abortion
you laid on a table before me like i would deliver them
they induced labor and were ready with instruments:
with a metal cutting device and a vacuum
the orderlies positioned themselves at your sides
like i was the audience
each baby emerged and i looked close
i could see the color of their hair, far along
the color of their eyes; this seemed late-term
and reacting again, they were so small
but unnatural; eyes are never opened or so small–
two daughters
one had auburn hair, one blond
one blue-eyed, one green
somehow they were the size of tiny dolls
gazing back up at me, strangely
not possible– they were breathing and blinking so clearly
completely alive like small birds fallen from a nest to a gutter
i wanted to reach down and lift one up to me–
and they were decapitated before my eyes
this metal cutting instrument held by an orderly moved quick
each head fell to the ground
in the dream i was crying afterwards
in another place, recounting this to my father
telling him, i realized we made a terrible mistake
a very terrible mistake
How many people have ever lived or died?
“This semi-scientific approach yields an estimate of about 106 billion births since the dawn of the human race. Clearly, the period 8000 B.C. to 1 A.D. is key to the magnitude of our number, but, unfortunately, little is known about that era. Some readers may disagree with some aspects— or perhaps nearly all aspects—of the table, but at least it offers one approach to this elusive issue. If we were to make any guess at all, it might be that our method underestimates the number of births to some degree. The assumption of constant population growth in the earlier period may underestimate the average population size at the time. And, of course, pushing the date of humanity’s arrival on the planet before 50,000 B.C. would also raise the number, although perhaps not by terribly much.”