ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Four Poems
by Jack Boettcher



Sociornithology

Celibate swans, you float a secret path
to kill want. Asked secret & your answer
is maunder. Abandoned campsite/ cord
of wood left cold. You do not snap
the floral spines of bantamweights,
the old fights collapse to tape hiss
& click. Other birds are noisy, clasp
like thieves’ gloves to bare branches,
in the pain light of this river
they look like leaves too drunk to fall.
You swans don’t answer them you’re inward.
You’re half-ultimate & blessed,
flight like bronze. Your cleanness
stirs the brownish water sinners dip
their scarred loafers into.
And farther along, behind a gray cypress
grove, your theocratic ritual bloodshed
is also a part of this day at the park.

Farm Poem

Again: dear N: listen: hummingbirds:
imagine if they lightly ruptured
from all this cyclic mayhem
over the pale blue nail-flecked
porch. And dust puffed out
or pollen. And the sound of this
just louder, but a lot like soda
settling in a squat round glass
where afternoon becomes evening.
Now I will answer your questions.
You ask about wasp stings.
I think wasps sting children
more. I think children whittle
wasps’ nests into little boats
with their multi-function
Swiss-imported pocketknives.
We are looking at the farm again,
the only direction we ever face.
A moment passes back and
forth, again and into
always. Sun shifts, flinches
into rust. A hawk arcs over-
head, part-eternal. You ask about
time, again, and I say it’s like
this huge fake red beard, again, I’m
being a little sincere, and we
are hunkered in pockets
of warm pink cheekfat
together underneath it deep.
Until one of us dons
the fake red beard laughing
and together we catapult.

from The Deviants

(Contemporary Piracy)

The sailor slapped the jukebox grabbed the tiller called this moon emotion. I brought his marijuana. I was with them for a season paying debts I’d reaped in sinner’s taxes. I played the fiddle for them and I played the accordion poorly. They were rich pirates and fed me well and how to talk about the spirit’s grief that welled up when I knew I was one too. That map. You know we played a lot of really violent video games. One hour past madness and nearing Mogadishu we dropped the sails and it was quiet. The sea erupting at the level of silence. We washed the stained lands from our maps and our revelry and laughter was fuller even darker than birdclatter. Then the jukebox sputtered a damp and bloody minor chord. Some sparkling teeth. A throaty omen splitting the frayed tan speakercloth. All paled to dread. The deviants.

(The Deviants)

The first time I saw the deviants I was too young to know that it was wrong but I definitely remember the image of when they evangelized to the child by the filthy rust belt river – I had just closed the barbershop and was walking home on the icy embankment but I wasn’t whistling when I saw that. I was crouching in the rust tinged snow. I’m not one for particulars but everybody knows that is the river where they went to be born, and everybody knows about the soft words they spoke inside their moms until their moms settled in at the banks in those painted tin shacks warped with chemicals - and so bore them into the current, hoping they would disappear. But like usual they were alive that afternoon, cooking something foul in a firecracker smolder, the burnt aluminum was heavy in the westerly, and they were speaking just as softly to the child, probably an orphan but nevertheless a well-schooled orphan, from my view, and from their gestures it looked like they were telling him the parable about holding it in and how the deviants were against that particular parable, about how they would always follow the release of the bladder, unconditionally, as a sort of guiding principle. And I thought to myself Alfonso, what’s wrong with that? Hell I walked away. I knew they spoke a language of their own without stops, and I knew it could tap the blood from your eardrums if whispered close enough to feel the sexy breath. That winter was lonely for the middle-aged men, nobody seemed to need a haircut or a hot shave.