Stopping at the Penult

Partitioning, snow’s excuse, the edges we take our shovels to

You want a divorce? Moon on horn rim, black plus of window shadow, I want to counterfeit Hell

With mouths a-lying

No.

One time as a kid, I called 1-800-HOT-LIPS from a funeral home

A voice whispered I can’t wait to rub my hot wet lips all over your

I wondered, My what? Later, I drew the dead

In a notebook, ghost leaving up and to the left like a white tissue 

Pulled from the middle

ξ

Dream of Catching a Fish Outside my House

You hung yourself in Lawndale, and shook loose

Waters of life vs. house of same, or the opposite. Visions of police 

Patrol this bight in relation to the mainland

As though main, cut to pieces in the streams

Crossing and recrossing, intruded thought-like in the night

And sleep never came

I woke up and took a piss thinking about love. I had this thought of you

Being a little fish I caught and understood, the way

Day calls for showers understands a chance of non-compliance

Whenever such things are summoned

ξ

He Grants a Creator

I put the trucknuts you hated on, a falling 

Like bones in the earth, that slow unrighting, truth 

Settles, I miss you 

Like Bondo looks, unplumb barns’ posts

Tying without, though truth is a constraint, constraint 

As in, Remove your fucking hands, or The lies I tell myself

Hurt only x or My heart lies

On him                        

And will not remove

ξ

Smoking Out

You said I don’t like how easy it is that April feels like yesterday

And now I’m OK not talking to my family. Earlier, we discussed setting fire to a bird’s nest 

As theatre of Subject blowing into the hollowest spot of the stack 

And Bird’s nest as what’s interesting

Vs. How we can try to be better kids, fire-theft being troubling to the old man, not due to light 

But smoke, as smoke’s its own flight surrogate for thought. Pine laces frizzling 

General things pulling their orange cuffs

ξ

To Crush the Latter

Why test the memory of first-graders, why association

Air, conditioning, -borne, -plane, -fresh -guitar, -raiding rifle, -edale terrier, -blow, -job

His favorite cartoons

Condition, deepen, texturize, in one fairies fly, sleep descends as sparkling

Powder; another bubbles a gat on a scantron; another’s trash is another can’s carbo

I truth or dare you to puff out your cheeks ‘til you feel your jaw pockets inflate

A sentence as concept, trouble as sentence, conceive’s what fucking does

In secret, so punishing is the grade of a first affair

Principal draws a house over the dick a kid drew on the park’s dark orange tube slide

Yeah but now doesn’t it live in there

ξ

Brendan Sherry lives in Greeneville, TN. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, New South, Word For/ Word, A-Minor, and elsewhere. Note: The poem, “He Grants a Creator,” uses a line (“my heart lies on him and will not remove”) from a contemporary arrangement of a Child Ballad (Child 239, Roud 102).