UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

The happiness and devastation of mail
We must balance these notions somehow
Huffing computer cleaner that once was fun tho
Many things to be confused about as a person
Blue colors, westward sky, testy dilettantes
Everything about why I am like me is science
What silly mechanism for existing do we yet here have
Is it making fire in the hills above the quarry, the lumberyard
All the snorkeling equipment and molecular paradox
Intramural softball leagues in rural parcels
All of this wonderful green in the world and everybody dies still
When was there a real place to go to to find the source
I think I have the problems
Yes they’re with me

My Secret Midnight 

Dear, I don’t think I am the right me 
I don’t say the right word 
And the trapdoors open 
And where are the right memories 
I don’t have the best moonlight 
In the void there is inexplicable presence 
There is urgency to a feeling 
It feels weird to believe, and yet 
I love the feeling nothing feeling 
The wind and spinning things 
Small rainfalls, the smallest 
Lilacs in the prairie wave 
Air italicizes everything in this world 
None of the pieces fit together 
What if narrative made more sense 
It doesn’t really matter now 
I would have done a lot of stuff 
I would have written you sooner

THE MAIN CHARACTER DRESSES UP AS A CLOWN

Says cheese
Says I’m just a vortex
Says obviously this is happening today
Says the sun is up, it’s over
In the middle of some poem
Someone never bothered
To finish writing so
Says it’s a different poem
A poem from before
A poem that continues after
Someone completes reading it
It elapses in a rainy place by itself
In a book that doesn’t exist
While taking a rest on the couch
The afternoon like a cloud going by
And inside the poem world the world
Of all the other poems and experiences
Rain checks, sad data
Everything hurts, say

SONNET

Little scrap of paper, o where
Are we exactly in the tumble

What we can’t know makes us lonely
Kosmische sunset so beautiful

It keeps on going beneath the world
And in these moments circles stop

The near and far just collapse
The draw to see what is and isn’t real

The names for things and things
W/o names, or any notions of names

Of having to’ve been named before

Little wind, little time, some little red
Feelings scattered in the hayfield

In the beginning we were together there

Ian Fishman is a poet from the Connecticut River Valley of western Massachusetts. He publishes and edits Press Brake, a chapbook vehicle.