THINGS IN THROATSThere is something stuck in my throat and when I cough it swells and when I swallow it sticks. I think it’s made of matches or the little plastic toys from a gumball machine. It tastes like childhood, the years between eight and eleven, when there are too many elbows and scabby knees and the future hangs like a dust cloud. But when I’m sleeping and the darkness is two fists over my eyes it feels like something else. Something swollen. Something to palpate. Something that needs looking after. Something like the drainage ditch behind the field where the flowers don’t grow and the deer won’t walk and the dog always whines and that one time you went over the fence through the brambles across the puddles and met the man with the cement eyes and the rough fingers and learned that things in throats don’t need sunlight to grow. PAPER CUTThe bougainvillea in our garden are wild, their pink petals a most somber cliché. A rigid knuckle of sky stamps them down, splaying, splitting, plundering. Guts and obscenity flood the yard. Cat piss dog shit beautiful day. We begin by discussing Asger Jorn. We end by debating who is the bigger cunt, while the dying dog sleeps at our feet. We speak in rhyme and unreason and sometimes un-rhyme and excuse. We speak in permanent dissolution, dissention between periods; semicolons between our legs. Poetry is fundamentally unappealing. Alienating. I don’t remember if you said that or if it was just implied when I took my notebook and went to sit outside beneath the spangled clouds of ugly nothings. They bloom even when we forget to water them. Fertile fucking rebuke. The pages of my notebook fall open and I finger their edges, searching for a paper cut. ✱✱✱
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