BJ SOLOY

The Coast of Old Barbary

​

A bird builds a nest in your neck.
​It’s a Magnificent Frigate Bird

& its nests are legion.             Your sentences,
​understandably, stray.             Your days

grow confusing & you’re compelled
​to the sea where you begin choking on a shanty.

You hunt albatross & then their life-mates
​miles away, adapting your scrimshaw
​to their sizes’ shapes.             The crag

of your jaw beaks neatly out. You wear
​your windburn like new panties.

Your neck’s magnificent crag            beaks stray
​You hunt            your sentences            your days

You hunted             my pine            in
​                        these safe sheets            calling

​the water             our feathers                        belly-white             and buried.

Of Bang & Blab

​

I consider my life’s plain
​accumulation of facts. Crickets saw

the hour down.            You returned
​the wine, earlier, from your glass

to the bottle.
​It drained all
​the heat from your fingers.

                                    Elsewhere,
​I say, “Trees,
​please keep it down …
​                        Wind—

please—settle
​your compulsions.
​Let’s pull it together!”

I survey my surround
​as a satellite

& catch a glance— the edge
​of witness—the eerie twitch
​it takes to turn

the fir to fire.

Let’s start this conversation
​some place new. Make me
​an inventory of all the places

your fingers have been.

Please shut up. There there.
​It’s the architecture—the damning

maze of angles so formulaic
​you lose yourself without being lost.

[ read more Issue 4.1 ]