Arms Long and Small
Cockspur, rosehip, did you
nibble my ilium? Didn’t
you purr? But I don’t remember
too much about you.
If I picture your lips I see blur.
I see dead pixel flurry,
starling murmuration of blank.
That first or second night
we clung to your roof, let stars
confuse us. We couldn’t tell
trite from wrong. How’d it go again,
that song? Something some-
thing moon? June? tune? How easily
time uncouples rhymes. How soon.
Green Blue Carmine Songlet
Dear zero, grant me this day
concancellation, height to fall by:
seed me embryo of tongue, contrails,
a verdigris name. The frequencies
have lost their charm. I am stubborn
as a barnacle, sessile and stuck
to what can be deciphered and borne.
All greens green as and all blues.
Is as what’s cracked or is? I would like
to be a net without strands,
an arthropod fruit, cochineal sound.
The contradictions amend.
If I can’t be nothing,
I can portend.
American Dream (6)
[someone to drive the car]
Sometimes in America
which is a road, I see a red
car carrying two women
who have the same face.
The driver drives. Her child
or double sits next to her,
her face folded in universal
origami of pain, mouth
open. She is shouting
something, but I can’t hear
her. Can the driver? She
doesn’t look over. She
looks at the road. She
looks in the mirror. She looks
like she is holding her face
very carefully, as if it might
drop, shatter. She looks
like a woman who’s held
many things many
smashed things. She
looks like everybody,
I meant to say.
Sam is a non-pseudonymous human with an MFA from UMass Boston & various other traits & appendages, chronicled in Google. His poem “i am michael derrick hudson” was featured in Rattle’s Poets Respond project. He lives & writes in Cambridge, Massachusetts.