ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
FOUR POEMS
by Brian Henry

Instructions for Old Poets, or
How to Become Laureate

You with your back twisted, your neck,
dilate your interference pronto
else the vengeance you find heaped
upon you will be decidedly slick.

Dash your sky dirtward, frown
that aching stretch into account.
Be shorn to lusterless ruins
and drip salvation around.

What you utter, utter slow.
Dust your body with a rag
and acquire a sensitive moan.

When, at night, you feel small,
unsteady, grab the closest leg
and bite--in the absence of leg, the wall.



Old Naked Poets

Bought the land for nothing
but what was handed down.



The Illusion of Bother

I try to paint on weekends and find
myself asleep at the easel at 4 a.m.,
cold and sour from the whiskey

on my tongue, my Landscape With Papaya
no further along than last week, brush
craggy from sleep, paint stubborn and sore.

I sway upright to walk to bed,
but nod into myself again,
and this bothers me.

The phone, when it rings,
always rings for me,
and this bothers me.

The elephant swaying, a mad buzz
in its head and its one friend put down,
that elephant bothers me.

I have a cock and I like to use it.
This doesn't bother me but it bothers me
that it doesn't bother me.

What bothers me is the way a bird,
when torn in two by the cat next door,
ends up, in part, on my porch.

I complain to my neighbor,
who says it's because the cat likes me,
and this bothers me.

The sight of Wal Mart shoppers,
among which I number,
fucking bothers me.

The way they stop inevitably
at each aisle, eye the magazines
at each checkout, browse and bend.

The pick-up jacked-up in front of me,
around which I never can see,
truly bothers me.

The MILRLT plates, the NASCAR sticker,
the rifle rack in the back,
they all bother me.

The car salesman who tells me
I won't pay "one red cent" more than invoice--
that red cent bothers me.

Confessional poems, or the 90s versions
of confessional poems, with their traumas
and post-traumas, epiphanies and anger,

the kinds of poems that deliver on a first
reading, nod idly toward artifice,
or, worse, pretend there's no art in it,

the poems that embarrass the reader
and should embarrass the poet,
I hate those fucking poems,

they really bother me.



Pact of Resistance

If I said the act affected me

If I said the pain is gone

If I said I saw the thing before

I felt it, and feel it still

If I used the past tense

In an attempt at moral authority

Or the present in an attempt

At the moral authority of song

If I said "we" and did not mean "we" or "you"

When the you would never see the "you"

When the you reading the "you" resisted the "you"

Or the "we," and insisted on the "I"

With the option of making exception

For a "you" that means you the reader

But not often, for our time would be better spent

Talking about me, not us

Whom this has never been about.