The Ringing
He called his mother to tell her how he was doing,
how he missed her as a man now who had made
his way into the world, found a job, settled down,
put away the childish things that made him King
of The Fields — the .22 and .243 with a 9x scope
through which he trained his eye on the ground hog
mounds and then squeezed off shots that hardened
his heart. “I miss you too,” she said, which he
could hardly hear for the ringing in his ears.
⟐ ⟐ ⟐ ⟐ ⟐
Bare and Live
When we waded chest-deep into the river,
we carried the current to our eyes
with a charge that raised the bodies inside
our bodies to sky. Turned our veins
to voltage. Minnows nibbled at our groins
while a murder of crows cawed from a pine
their rough alarms. We were in two places
at once like a wire stretched between
the cathodes of our desire — so bare and live
the ether hummed like a swarm inside the air.
⟐ ⟐ ⟐ ⟐ ⟐
Madness
How thin the line between the eye
and darkness that runs like a thread
in the hem of a dress until it loses
its stitch from the subtle stress
of wear and then loosens another
enough from just a single tear
until the entire dress loses its grip
and falls to the ground where it lies
like a captured ghost that’s just
been reified but cannot move
or haunt anymore without the body