Elegy with arms folded
Alison Thumel
You've told me you feel like a bat.
What you don't mean is your wings.
Or the development of a reflex that draws your ears toward small sounds.
What you do mean is that you're
You've told me you feel like a bat.
What you don't mean is your wings.
Or the development of a reflex that draws your ears toward small sounds.
What you do mean is that you're
brick
once in 2011
someone at a party
offered me rum
mixed with cough medicine
from a 1 liter plastic bottle of generic orange soda
i thought
this will make
The computers will run an error the size of oceans howling crazy for the pale moon & will hurtle through our bodies to get there. My brother says the lights across the river will burn out.
Whose hometown are we in in the dream? :: Do you hold my hand or do you disembowel me? Whose side are you on, anyway? :: My confession on this Sunday morning is: we are all human.
another kind of crime scene
walking to the post office with A
Let’s go back to the twin indigo suns/ in our eyes. To shooting holes/ through the walls of our skin, one/ metal kiss at a time...
Come closer reader, please,
I didn’t mean to insult you.
I’ll let you punch me
right in my asking face.
The full moon may strike you
dumb and limp and lost
when bat readies to encounter ball
and you hit it high as the moon--
still the ump declares, You’re out!
before you’ve moved a step from home.
There’s no TV or radio here, so it’s only later we hear that our guys lost big
at home on Blake Street
I would go back now, though, live in the nervous fidget
before I said I like you & kissed her braces
with my upper lip & bled all over her teeth.
There is something about listening
To a baseball game on the radio
each pitch lost in the peripheral blink of an eye
I’m hoarse and feverish. We sing in the streets, “Feelin’ good was good enough for me, hee hee,” but then the breakfast booth only has two seats.
I wear a velvet piece to the therapist’s office and she asks me to close my eyes. We agree to experience an illusion of me dancing...
I can’t stop watching teenage boys eat shit at the skate park.
It gives me real pleasure.
Every time I walk to the library
I pass my old friend’s house
who doesn’t live there,
or anywhere anymore.
"[Her Lesser Work] is a collection of mordant and formally inventive stories circling themes of, let’s say, desire and escape within repressive structures."
-Walker Caplan, Literary Hub