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.

 

 

 

About the Author

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.