transmission

rhyming yeehaw

with outside

must i earn my conclusion

violence of redistribution,

a teacher with writer’s block

air has a way

of replacing itself

unlike time

spent watching

french cinema

which annoys me

i had to hear you say it to agree.

plus-one ingenue in a getaway car

when i look i look everywhere

and my grievances

acquire increased specificity

these affairs

must be settled

or else stated

*

2 am in shanghai

the dj shared a name with

bottled alkaline water

*

as desire is full of distance.

as you like the american poets.

think of text as frame

frame the text before sending

*

wishing on

an operable star

the ocean’s revision

x-ray reveals hardware in the spine

i am beside myself

she said, and became replicate

the way a vessel is a holding

that is held on its side

i put my hand there

in its twiceness

is she ongoing

and negotiable

or an acquisition

a glass in hand

with its water

i like asking what

only she can answer

there would be no exchange

sonorous barbarous what

ever i have creates demand

makes a demand of me 

2017 was so easy

a year in that chair

i sat down beside her

*

o rose thou art sick

as sunlight does not flicker

DILATE

it’s difficult at the bar 

i want sleep from a chair

i want the permissible symptom

my wife eye

parts outside the opening

bodies of women

on the absolute

verge of thinking:

partial novel super-pastoral

belladonna Spirits of Saturn

& the natural names of music

gums ringed with blue you say

attention widens to collect

& pyramid is a bunker

that is insane

i am at risk

of being an arrangement

gesture with words

which appear as a threat

socially vicious

when so little

is at stake

SUNK

Before I knew I wasn’t buoyant,
I was bored. And self-amused.

A day of no consequence.
I ran across its surface.
You appeared to wave

and from where
I stood those depths
looked shallow. Maybe I thought

I was light river craft.
And could ferry.

Seeing me you shifted
money around in your hand. You fanned.

Where I asked with
no sense of object
did you get that.

The middle of my novel
was attempting to deliver
the promise of its being read.

The store, you said.
Elsewhere a child

was being held
by an inner tube
in a shallow pool.

Yellow tiles lent
the water its hem.
A messianic circuit.

I looked at the form
exchange takes.
My face hinged on interest.

I have never
been good
at aquatics.

You must have seen it.
I can only imagine
what that looked like.

Scout Faller is a Pushcart-nominated poet and recipient of the Leijia Hanrahan Scholarship for Communist Women Who Smoke. Their work is published or forthcoming in Discount Guillotine, Dialogist, and Dunce Codex, among others.