AWGN IV
grease-scented collapsing roof cracked concrete “this used to be”
dust bunnies empty rooms spray painted dead saplings
nuclear warnings surgical masks “naked mattress” rusted ladders
used condoms forgotten notes car batteries office chairs
Bunsen burners “the love room” forever names cold medicine
old boots safety signs cocks and tits family pictures
broken windows memorabilia stolen signs rubber gloves
“old Bodyworks” yellow paper camping fuel unfinished lists
PHASE ERROR IV
unwrap these tangled leads
silver daddy-longlegs bent around
resistances blue red and green and
a million different rings of color
charted out in explanations of
ohms and volts and trickles of current
events dripping down across
faces branded with Greek letters like
water torture counting down the
length of scrolls unraveled in opal-
colored skies we used to paint with
fingers stuck in broken sockets and
bodies humming at sixty hertz
so much current wires melt and
words clip in the amplifiers
every time I take the time to
listen to your muttering séance
the way you bring back more than
noise from broken power lines to
help me unbecome myself and
when loads fall off our shoulders
we can leave the open circuits
hanging in an empty sky
painted across the shivering Son
burnt by some uncausal signal-
fire filtered through toothless faces
filled with so many radiant eyes that
it gets difficult to see
the desert of milk and bitter honey
SAMPLING IV
Briars grown around these tracks
scratch muddy jeans. Headlights
swim in the distance between trees. Is this
the only road—or just the one you know?
An inkblot on this copper-leafed hill:
the tunnel is a gaping mouth. We walk
through a cavernous brick throat and shine
lights on rusted rails and old graffiti.
Kneel on the gravel and put
your ear against humming rail.
Can you hear the crying boys
pressing pennies on the track?
Try to count the spray-painted letters shaking down
the line near a crumbled hump in the road where rails like
veins were laid before my grandpa was born, and a train
we never thought would come again roars down Main Street.
TRANSMISSION IV
A day or so after some
faceless farmer harvested
all that bone-colored corn
and green rows of soybeans
running in pale lines over
the hills behind our house,
you dressed me up in
my brother’s salty-smelling
cracked-up leather varsity coat
and gave me a pair of steel-
toed boots to wear, and we
went walking through the heavy
red clay between the broken
arms of the rotten cornstalks
out to where the rust-encrusted
railroad tracks run off east to
the casinos and neon boardwalks
and cold salt of the Atlantic
and west to the burnt beaches
along the Pacific. We started
bouncing down towards town,
hopping between each wooden
rail-tie, over the prickly weeds
and each curled sapling growing
up through the fool’s gold
and silver-colored rocks piled
around the tracks, until the grey
roof of our house was buried by
the shaking woods. We must’ve been
a mile out, or somewhere near
our neighbor’s brick house,
where all the nets strung
below the bending steel arms of
the burning-ripe persimmon trees
were heavy and full of sunset-
colored fruit, because I could smell
the pulp rotting where it lay
from where we went walking by
beneath the leaves in the oak trees
that were starting to turn the same
color as the dying embers in
grandpa’s ashtray back home,
there at the glass table with all
our smudged fingerprints on it
where he was probably sitting
and watching The Price is Right,
and I remember you stopping there
to say, “You know there used to be
a train you could ride that came
through here? I guess the only
thing these tracks are good for
is walking anymore, but it doesn’t
even seem like we got
anywhere to go anymore
but home, and that’s not much
when there’s nowhere to work
and my mom dead and your mom
gone—just a bunch of old
persimmons is all it really is—
nothing left to do but cut
the seeds open to see if winter
is going to last through March,
kind of like the way that
doctor down in Louisville
told grandpa they were
going to get rid of his cancer:
just cut it all off and let it
rot until it starts to get better.”
Winner, 2016 Max Ehrmann Poetry Competition
ALIASING IV
tangled protein coils cellular breath of life
unwrapped evolutions of my mother tied my shoes
how many times we met swinging on the playground
“You have to tie the strings rubber-chip scented
bunny-eared like this.” push mowers roaring
I couldn’t hear you from the spring rain-puddled swing
seats that left our jeans soaking wet in the back of
my father’s Ford pickup your shirt off the dash
“I told you reel the hook in before your parents see us
before you hit the snag.” parked across the street
I hope you know I wanted to but pulling out is better than
getting another bottle of pharmaceutical chances
whiskey you helped me steal “I tried to tell my parents it
before you went down and would help with my acne
washed your make-up off but I think they knew
I tried to tell you how and I didn’t want to push it.”
but you didn’t know a foot whose mother taught you
of nothing more than words to bunny-ear your laces?
an acupunctured self silver needles stuck in
shivering snow-white flesh strawberry-pink nipples
an avalanche of shivers needles like radio towers
so many towers before “Sorry I dropped your call but
you count to infinity and is there anything you need?”
melt it down to words: a few continuous letters
“My dad would kill me.” but only so many words
at the right frequency modulating twisted legs
can make you say “Nobody else is home.”
you know what I meant double my confessions of
twice as many needles as nervous lightning running
down your bumpy back I will become the Word
just so you can live forever broken down
unraveled like my laces dangling above the puddles
so many needled words and gaps between your teeth
to bite or not to bite a tongue that won’t stop
“Friends that fuck friends or show them their desire
and forget to text them later.” in a jittery spectrograph
I will reduce myself to infinities in parts
digital black and white and a new cross that says
cosine my death certificate “If it only means
this time you’ll hear me say it: never really loved you.”