The Literary Review
Close-Up
I gently stroke the reposed dog
and let the fur tickle me like brushes
spontaneously popping up to paint the artist.
The fur is like a fluffy canvas,
blank enough to suggest creation
and yet demanding what the creation will be
in each soft stroke from the board to the hand.
A small bite.
I see a flea pass
my finger, walking with brief triumph
before traipsing aimlessly,
increasingly entangled in the hairs.
And I wonder what I’d do
if I were a flea, if I were lost
among those dandelions
that obscure my sight,
obstruct my search for drink.
What if my carpet were a dog’s fur,
the strands sprouting upwards,
my house itself growing legs,
the kennel the dog itself?
Would the canvas seem that blank then?
Would tickling lend itself to repose?
Ode to the Schwa
You’ve been calumniated, bosom buddy
of burps, accused of lazily pursuing
attention as the speaker dithers
while you assume your alias of “Uh.”
You definitely deserve a better rep.
Your gusts can blow Homeric lotuses
to sailors of audio waves, relieving them,
except for some sick-stomached sounds, of stress.
When formalist poets begin their game
of jumping from black stone to gray to black
again across the gravel lot, your gleam
quite often marks the way, and when they think
the rumble of bass drums isn’t loud enough,
the gentle shaking of your tambourine
provides a contrast to the clamor.
Amalgamation of the wind, the pebbles,
percussive force, and more–that’s what you are.
Within your modest puffing through the larynx,
the multitudes unite in peaceful flanks.
Putting a Coat On
The way it falls from the rack
and the way I pick it up
are how the trouble begins.
I should be able to find the hood,
but in the dark room, it blends in with the rest of the coat
like a white flag in a vat of glue
or a black flag in a vat of molasses
or a blue flag with a white stripe in a scummy pool.
As it is, my coat is green and wool.
Usually, wool’s more formal
than cotton unless flannel’s in play,
when wool becomes bombastically formal,
as pompous as a flat note echoing
from a tuba falling
right after it’s blown.
I don’t feel pompous,
merely foolish as I place one hand
through an arm but can’t find the opening
for my other hand. Stitches crisscross
around the armholes like coordinates
to an obtuse map. And as for my other hand,
it is indisposed, unable to help me hold up the rest
of the coat, as lost in the terrain as anyone else,
as incapable of helping me right now
as everyone else who’s gone this morning.
Fake Mustache, Nose, and Glasses
They see the mask as ostentatious irony,
comical in just how little it actually disguises,
and they don’t even recognize how it was made,
the materials it uses.
After they finished beating us at the protests,
we stole their batons and melted them down
to form the frames of our lensless glasses.
When the adhesives their spies hid
in the mailboxes exploded, those of us
who survived gathered what rubber remained
into noses. And the mustache
tied to the nose? No special
origin story there. Just plastic
in a black zig-zagging pattern,
the shadowy counterpart
to a jack-o’-lantern’s smile,
a canopy to the pumpkin’s grin
so strong that onlookers passing by
see only vague candlelight trembling.
So, too, does the mustache hide
our knowing, mocking grins.
Linguistinguishable
I signify without the signified.
I am a mangled portmanteau of five words,
incomprehensible upon creation.
I am perceived as nonsense syllables,
an onomatopoeia of white noise
across the page, although the readers know
my origins (the long-forgotten words
that merged to form my flesh) had meanings,
in fact had widely disparate meanings,
and yet I can’t remember them at all.
I signify without the signified.
I am a transitive verb with no object,
or more specifically, I am “to do,”
a verb amorphously floating on
a paper pool without context or syntax
to help define myself. Not setting fires,
not sitting on my knees, not fixing lunch,
not recording videos of dogs in heat,
not reading nor writing, I’m just “to do.”
I only say that someone does something,
but I don’t know which someone, which something.
I signify without the signified.
I envy people used in metaphors.
I roll my eyes at those who think themselves
dehumanized when they’re compared to rugs,
acanthus leaves, or apple juice boxes.
Provided I’m accepted as myself,
I’d love to be a word in flesh, companion
to another image, just as powerful
as “the smell of stovetop eggs,” the page’s phrase
that makes me think of prefaces to breakfast.
Likewise, perhaps the dryness of my hands
could signify “a little garden’s drought.”