ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Three Poems
by Brent Armendinger


All Talking Is Arrows

1. You must forget every story and grind scissors into dust.

Inside the closet an old man
resembled sighing. A wooden lack
to burrow out from. Hear
my blood sliding against a capillary
window, the sound of wet
tires at night. Clouds press the roof
into scrawny math. The unheavy mask
is falling off him.

1. Teeth take first. Until it is an exit wound.

I could have walked into the bedroom with a blindfold,
painted my face with eraser. Elbows
bending truth through sorry.
But I chose copper. Let me
explain, there is a brook where Dad
taught us how to catch crayfish.
I wore them like bracelets.
Not picking up the phone. Silver
spiders of light through the kitchen
window, the cracking sky, the smell
of walking alone. Everyone
called it “creek.”

1. Not a pendulum but a snake.

When my skin is slow
as green, a thousand fronds.
Glacier with a pulse, muscle.
The moon is a wayward lamb
tonight, trilling on the other
side of pines. The railroad
is so close, the wolves. Ribbon
a trail with dream to make them
lose their way.

1. Outside of want, breath was only happening.

 
            through                                         not                                                stay
While you have a thing it can be taken from you [...] but when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then forever when you have given it. It will be yours always.—James Joyce

in the window between                     one room filling                                 the boat of body with
    sleep-flake or mud                 where feet keep sticking                   a needle scratch         ing its
code              into the field          illegible field hum       no       speaker           on the edge
 of the blanket called          love            is not            opposite                those holes  in
moon              how blue                wings search out craters                           to spill                     up
          not-opposite                     loneliness       poured out                 failure           soup    you’re
laughing at the color                   what a private thing is color                        thinking there is no
          pin on the night, blue     seeds fall through each                       crater            out
    the other side body                            is a room        full of ghosts  inside            is to cover      up
with scarves and hear         you    missing                    me                   going bald is just
     your head                              getting ready   to be                                another          baby



Dear M______ ,

The words you wrote break
into a wet alphabet
at 30,000 feet. I hold my cheek
against the cold unglass envelope
staring through the letter’s lint to locate morning
triangulating your pillowcase, your cat-hair
aquarium. Language, that slow pet.

At baggage claim the flags
weep. The five-pointed knots of foam
hovering just above blue. Elsewhere, how violence
is horizontal. The blood cleanly divided
from smoke.

All our lives, really—
this ulcer of versus.
Competing shadows fall off my body
and hold a shaking white cup
between yes and no on the wall.

What do birds think?
Our mistakenness, how flying
means outside means feather belonging
to cloud. They fly into windows
longing to know we are sky.
Imagine your
moon-clinging Atlantic iris
           slipping over the angular fields and
factories of your face.
Feel safest now.
The envelope seals out the brittle coast,
these gift minutes before paved existence.
Remember this, amniotic.