Junkyard 1 (week 3)

My soles flip-flop
in the backyard blues
watching chicken wings crackle and dance
in liquid heat while my right-hand beer
swigs today away.

Improv 1 (Week 3)

Wheels of Steel
Adrian Matejka

I got me two songs instead of eyes—
all swollen and blacked out

like the day after a lost fight. Two
jigsaws spinning, buzzing the backdrop

for woodshop or emcee, bar mitzvah
or afterset. It’s DJ Run, DMC rocking

without a band, but not without me.
I make it rain. I make it rain on these

shined up rims still spinning after the car
stops. Dubs kind of grind like me

in their perpetuity. I’m the Wizard
of Oz if Oz was a fish fry in July.

Call me Master of the Cracked Fingers.
One song spins forward, the other

back to repeat itself: Every day I’m
hustlin’. Every day I’m hustlin’. Baby,

I’m the layaway payment on a Ferris
wheel. My songs orbit parking lots

and rent parties like the crazy lady’s
eyes when she finds out her lover man

already left…It’s all because of you,
I’m feeling sad and blue. One of my songs

spins backward, while the other plays
forward like sugar mixing in to make

the grape. My joints are the pinwheels
in this parade of moonwalks and uprocks:

See, I like to get down, Jack.


Improv:
“I got me two songs instead of eyes—
all swollen and blacked out”
they play dogged, sidelong at you
two spinning plates stuck on repeat
between your chest and the fur
necking at your ears.
Your cheeks cube rosy when I
ask: would you like your mango with salt?
Then a tripwire: Jerry Leather eyes whip me like boot straps;
I dispatch.

While you drip cobbler from your nails
I sink my hands deep:
thumbing spoons in soap,
fumbling over spatchulas
that stick to your thighs
like saddle bag reflectors.

Free write 1 (week 3)

It’s raining the color blue and I am seaside
filling my pockets with denim and nautili.
My Nordic haunts: a saline mixture of switches, prattle and mutt.
Hot wires warm and, at midnight, begin to spin silk,
the orange spiders that hammock my dreams.
In lucidity I am my father’s Gregorian chant:
a churning rhythm, a booze strung rant.
I wake, knee deep in the muck of linen
I cling, all balled up skin flaking till I’m spread dermis, a milli-thin veneer.

Tonight, I am the rings around the moon.
I am lunacy arching its back to laugh
and wheel barrel all the way home.

Improv 1 (week 2)

From "Introductions" by Jillian Weise

"After we've introduced ourselves
with gin and tonic and jazz,
a woman asks to read our palm."
I slid down your leg's trombone
and rub the sandpaper on your hips.

Impatient, the palm reader exhales
in fact, she hisses and it smells of
sodden cardboard. I consider if the man collecting my trash
at 5:48 in the morning has the same stench.

These folks measure yesterday in pounds of grease
My neighbors, the man flicking to light an end,
Everyone around us smiles and,
waving paper towels like scarves,
they drive bomb this town

Junkyard quote 3 (week 2)

A lot of empty outcries
next to the hospital
witnesses the comings
and goings of pallets
the trappings of a life
strapping patience down

Junkyard 1-2 (week 2)

As I move this inkwell across the parched and barren
my pen comes to rest on a Gila monster
black and beady with a stinging tongue

we eat fur pie and roasted rope soup
at the mayor’s estate.
His wife offers me a panther’s claw
but I refuse, digging my eyes into scalloped moth balls
encrusting her lips

Free Write 1 (Week 2)

We venture to Tennessee together,
my Indian and I,
with slop on the roads
riding in each other’s laps.
All the time, my face,
hangs its droopy eyes out the window
to catch fire flies in the eyelids.

Once, we played with six shooters:
evenings filled with port and
bacon-wrapped minion.
You licked my face like a dog when
we assailed the neighbor’s hedgerows
to pop BBs in front seat of your Volkswagen.

But now, now Tennessee
and the tin siding of your face
that I imagine as I bed you in rust
Laying you on the springboard mattress stamped
Captain Daniels Adventure Highboy

Free Write 2 (Week 1)

It’s a grab bag of cheap beer,
Nice ass and nuts.
The depraved stand starving
Near the gates of this amusement ground
Waiting for hedgehogs, swine
To dig tunnels for them
Tunnels that grow into caverns
The empty spaces underground
I live there, damp sooty, mildew
Now here comes a clown whose make up…
No… wait… no clown
Just a funny mirror, a waitress
Painted, plastered on beauty
That reigns supreme, that dives into you just
To see your lover’s green
Get washed down by Dixie cups
And pink panties.
Fill me up, water me down.
My only request: that you fool me
Trick me, deceive me until
Morning.

Junkyard Quote 5 (Week 1)

I've seen those fishnets in your closet.
The one the post worker hand delivered
a parcel to match your brown eyes.
When they grip your torso
squeezing grapefruit passions
and juicing my loins.
We'll huddle under pines
shining flecks of mica in red Georgia clay
Sticks, needles, dry rope
the green tomato seeds in my eyes
that fall like lollipops
on your cheeks

Junkyard quote 4 (week 1)

I stuck my neck out
to find him below
sifting through our refuse
the twisted of his beard
would not lose the shoe string,
maybe spaghetti.
His hunger pulling the entrails of a dumpster
splayed out on concrete and
he notices me
smiles, scratches his crotch
while I count the chunks of canned corn
infesting his scruffle-grit

Free write 1 (week 1)

I had a dream in New York City
A terrier—squat, wiry
we walked each other
he me, I him.
I wore my collar with splendid pride
as the terrier stepped daintily
on hind legs.
An Italian met us
didn’t like us.
I popped off
told him something about
the Catholic church and
tight leashes.
The hound yelped
you could see his breath
sick dog with yellow teeth.
Or was it me?

Now I’m awake
the dog still walks
toward my bed and
he wears a badge that speaks
authority.
Now his paw rests on my chest
opal eyes, he pants
my chest swells to raise his brown nails.

There is no cure for this one.
A whimpering sack of fur
begins to grow on my chest
tail between my legs
I raise up in bed
follow my canine doctor
four sharp teeth, good for incisions
and other things surgical

I’m waiting for him
to lay me down
to put me to sleep.

Improv 1 (Week 1)

For the Stranger
By: Carolyn Forché


Although you mention Venice
keeping it on your tongue like a fruit pit
and I say yes, perhaps Bucharest, neither of us
really knows. There is only this train
slipping through pastures of snow,
a sleigh reaching down
to touch its buried runners.
We meet on the shaking platform,
the wind’s broken teeth sinking into us.
You unwrap your dark bread
and share with me the coffee
sloshing into your gloves.
Telegraph posts chop the winter fields
into white blocks, in each window
the crude painting of a small farm.
We listen to mothers scolding
children in English as if
we do not understand a word of it—
sit still, sit still.

There are a few clues as to where
we are: the baled wheat scattered
everywhere like missing coffins.
The distant yellow kitchen lights
wiped with oil.
Everywhere the black dipping wires
stretching messages from one side
of a country to the other.
The men who stand on every border
waving to us.

Wiping ovals of breath from the windows
in order to see ourselves, you touch
the glass tenderly wherever it holds my face.
Days later, you are showing me
photographs of a woman and children
smiling from the windows of your wallet.

Each time the train slows, a man
with our faces in the gold buttons
of his coat passes through the cars
muttering the name of a city. Each time
we lose people. Each time I find you
again between the cars, holding out
a scrap of bread for me, something
hot to drink, until there are
no more cities and you pull me
toward you, sliding your hands
into my coat, telling me
your name over and over, hurrying
your mouth into mine.
We have, each of us, nothing.
We will give it to each other.


Improv:
Although you mention Venice
keeping it on your tongue like a fruit pit
and I say yes, perhaps Bucharest, neither of us
really knows where we store ourselves away.
the French compote on my leg and
sticky seeds brings the Dienstmädchen
with yet another white towel.
You tell me things cozy
and I dream into each stop.

There’s the peddler with stuffed animals,
he’s praying over them.
There’s the lighthouse on a hill
or a commercial jetliner.
We’re moving too fast
you complain as I sweep down your sheets,
nuzzle my ass into your bed
to make things warm.
There’s too much rocking.
Have we slid off yet?
You jerk my tie
just to hold on
as we grind metal
shifting our weight around Alpine peaks

Junkyard Quotes 1-3 (Week 1)

1. The canal milkshakes into this city
Pies cobblestone archways
while wavers with pocked up eyes
fight cats
the night nurses walk floor to floor
wet like springtime sunflowers
in a convulsive fit of feminine passion
my body hangs a corpse out the window

2. Sometimes I fall asleep
pissing. Half in dream, half in my pants.
She’d look a whole lot prettier
if I didn’t have to watch her switch
my bedpan.

3. I’d stretch a desert across your stomach
a steppe for your spine
Buzzards could sweep down
spill themselves into one another
until they’ve sucked up all
your tightly packed insides

Past Work (week 1)

Here is a collection of poetry that I wrote last spring.

Reclamation
At El Dorado Lake, Kansas,
the drift wood rises dead from black water
the petrified bones of some beast,
catching migrating eagles with its mossy suckers.
My pickup follows currents across the sea floor.

In this limestone basket of dried walls,
weaved from wheat shocks milo, and bound with barbed wire
road EE points to the scenic route lining the lake.
Touring caved-in factories and shotgun drug stores
the wind jostles my Ford.

A glint of tin siding in the rear view mirror
and the tires squirt gravel,
screening entire towns
where rebellion meant
dancing on Sunday.

Coronado Street, Cortez Avenue,
a red-eyed drunk watering his cactus
with obscenity.
A five-stringed guitar,
a three-wheeled car on an altar of cinder blocks.

In the dreams of the drunk
Coronado wanders this Abyssal plain,
still flooding whole towns
precisely so gold can be found.


Camping Near Logger Trails

Into the smoldering rib cage of that pine forest
Too late for loggers and turpentine hearts,
We kicked shadows deeper into twilight,
Tripped over limestone, and roots:
The gnarled knuckles of the worn and sleeping.
The trail wheezes through the still smoking earth.
I hack along dead brush and the promise of richer soil,
My lover three burning steps away.

In the clearing, a logger’s cabin
Roofless and drained of color,
Its planks splintered, two broken windows and a caved-in door:
The face of a logger a few years from collapse.
Charred tongues of its timber creak and moan,
The windows offer only flecks
Fractured portraits of our stares.

I want us to fall here,
Split by the logger’s swing
Our hair stirring the scorched ground.
I tell her to take my hand, hold me down.
I tell her we can sleep in the ash,
Smear sooty hands across our faces, and black out.
I want her mouth to fill mine with dust
I want her to smolder like an ember.


A Coal Miner in Retrospect

Summer stripped the leaves of him,
dusted his hands
into a bowl of soup.
He rolls white papers
between stained fingertips,
taps the ember in his bowl:
some liquid ashtray
floating flakes of grey potato skin.

The shadows outside—stretch and filter
through the naked tangle of the willow.
Spider-webbed roots choke the cellar windows
that drape the room in dusk.
He wipes the last slice of day from his plate,
his wine matured without the memory of seasons,
cured by monotony.

To count each inhalation
his coal miner hands drag
down the slick stones heating winter
down the oily veins ejecting electric promises,
down the summer sun he felt but never saw.
The throaty release, smoky fingers
blown against the frost bitten window pane.

To count each filtered breath,
thinking of the thick air
swallowed nightly, tasting the day.
The sulfuric of that place
filling his mouth with scorched earth.
Downing beers with neon suns flickering
until tomorrow’s hands scrape and score
the raw underbelly of mountains.
To count the warm air
sucked between his fingers,
hands exposed by work that peels
the doer and the done.


The Girl on the Third Floor

She slides red and yellow into the water
of a room of evenings. Shadows
hang their thick X’s on the wall.
We sneak away, press old wood floors
polished by her father’s consistency.

She opens the window for a cigarette,
and in the sun’s final act, behind a chorus
of birch and pine, I hold her naked.
Last summer passes underneath us,
in streets exploding with children and bicycles.

Later, cicadas whine in the cut grass.
The air cools. She blows smoke
on my body, tells me about her Russian dolls,
her fear of ladders. I slide her into my arms,
into damp covers on the third floor,
the moon peaks around floral curtains.
Soon, I will fall out of the window,
down to the street, will ride my bicycle
past a house, and shout toward her
opening a window on the third floor.


Robert & Morris Drug Store
A white that burns your eyes, an alcohol white. This brilliance, an outpost on the fringe of town in the late burn of summer when the sun’s a beacon. Across the street you hear birds thud the windows, fall to the porch, where, a few moments later a tall man appears with a squat stool and a yellow rag. The man and the mess gone in minutes never to disturb the well maintained purity of the house; a purity of blue-clean glass and deep shadows that keep the interior activities quiet. At night, the windows’ crème shades were eyelids half open to the town and the shadows within moved through a florescent glaze. The house, blanketed in the moon’s white covers, kept its pulse in the tick and tock of a grandfather. Perhaps if you passed by on a nighttime stroll, you might hear the faint murmur of that grandfather chiming in synch with the thump-a-dump of your beating heart or perhaps you might not.

We knew only a few, inconsequential oddities within the house. We knew only what the crisp glass showed us. By the light of day you could see the clock, gold-trimmed and snug against the wall. On the shelf behind the window an odd assemblage of watercolor portraits and green glass bottles gathered. A wooden bookcase—empty and an antique cash register lay directly behind them. If you came into town on a day trip you might catch yourself staring in and think, “These possessions clutter my view. They degrade this place. They are nothing worth my time. Look at the windows that mirror, see the purity of this radiant house.” These thoughts might cross your mind or they might not.

A house so tidy with its white pillars propping up the town’s pride and allowing us to sleep sound in mind and still in body even as the old man piles earth upon another fresh cut in the backyard. “It must be the birds, large ones like the albatross and pelican,” we murmur in our sleep. Their white feathers prove the whiteness of the house and, after all, who would notice the dirty, pocked earth around such clear windows, such a brilliant place.