FANZINE

SPECIFICS

To make bruiseless
moves at night because
I’ve made wood memory.

*

To hear screams
as experiments
at songs from too much.

*

To see life coming
and to go with you
into it (death, too)

and to not see a corpse
or what’s before it
as nutritious.

*

To sound other than
the way (any way) that this
computer sounds.

 

 

 

TAKEN

a circular road
with a crook

so very slight

that I think
that I know

that it’s a line

 

 

 

THE PAINT NEED BE REAL

_{after Roger Raveel’s Koren en witte rechthoek, 1968-1988}

or so the painting
complains—

its dreams in swarms,

a sic
at every strikethrough;

for years half touched and hacked

back into glances;
a this, a that,

a the other thing churning in dirt.

*

Surprise!
—still more

to feel there,

a right
word

not unimaginably

not
that far away.

 

 

 

COOL JERK

Books and stages are boxes
of time. But LCD screens?
That’s unprecedented ice.

*

Fair enough. You turn and leave
the room like it’s a person.

*

Aghast, life asks after you,
its tongue justly colorless,
having not in the least—
imagine that—grasped your loss.

 

 

 

CIRCUS ANOLE

You bought a slim lizard that
was chained to a pin, and you
wore the pin, and the lizard
walked around you till it died.

 

 

 

CHARMED, I’M SURE

Me first.

You first.

Shotgun.

Not it.

*

One question:
why can I care?

*

Sincere despair’s
a dark
back vowel,

one else in a room
in a house that’s there

for now.

 

 

 

LOST POEM

The quantity
I bow to

when coached
into the crowd

is just my own—

one cloud (or flower)
already like

the rest but not
the one good jewel.

*

I told myself
remember where

you put it and
I know I know

what “it” was

but I can’t recall
what “where” was—

the trouble,
just as well.

 

 

 

THE KEY TO THE FIELDS

To turn
back clocks

in search
of sources—

plausible
or recognized

or not—
is pointless,

except
for the purposes

of ordering the work
in its entirety,

in some eternalist
history

of art,
which the writer,

for my part,
incidentally,

rejects.

——————–

_{Graham Foust is the author of six books of poems, including To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (Flood Editions 2013), a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award, and Time Down to Mind (Flood Editions, 2015).  With Samuel Frederick, he has also translated three books by the late German poet Ernst Meister, including Wallless Space (Wave Books, 2014).  He works at the University of Denver.}