David Schaefer
Blue Jays in Japan
Daniel Gohman
Let us wed our fear of fracture
To our faith in its ascent.
Strange cycles emanate from
The quarterback who is I.
Dark water, dark air,
Ungraspable exclusion,
Let me know the breeze
As it hungers through my diamonds.
Let me freeze in space
Like a queen of beasts,
Or else proctor
The next college entrance exam.
There are times when you wake
And with the buffeting reticence
That greets you like a nudist
You must confer or else cave,
And that is how it is.
The early darkness drains
Its ancillary widgets:
A peacock from a pound of mirrors.
I, at the sounding gavel,
I, in the perfume of gauze,
Giddyup to droughts of shadow
Inopportune as the day is tangy.
For the moment, do not deprecate
The xylophone
At the fugitive's potluck.
Try and dilate your zeros
To mention the proclaimed.
In the brass and balding turnstiles,
Beneath a peach-fuzz moon,
We giggle indiscreetly,
Each of us known and thirstless,
A fossil fracking the loom.
Bullet Trains of Mourning
A shadow bathes itself in every room
Like an addendum.
The calendar is as unknowable
As the eye of the bull.
I have gone and drawn water
From the illegible fountains
With God’s impatience at my shoulders.
Dust poured from the ground like violet.
Your tongue, it becomes marrow.
Your hands, bouquets of mine.
It is lovely waking up
To the embers of last night’s fire,
The door into the world
Slapping against its frame.
We are all gold and no forgetting,
A camera in a cask of apricots,
Roses wending from a rich man’s mouth.
Place the sieve over nothing but itself,
The echo will tear apart like a lime.
At night, touch the scorpion
Stoic on your stack of laundry,
Where it will follow you deep into your sleep,
Where a cold blow of air
Will poison you completely,
And all of your love will remain.
David Schaefer lives in Austin with his dog Juliet. His work can be found in The Bridge, Forklift, Hobart and elsewhere.