j o s e p h m u l h o l l a n d

Love Poem (with Taxidermy)
	you dig up my sky of sulfonic acid tousing it under the prickling low-wattage expired bones converge—a monochrome bouquet out on the public altar your reflection is wet behind the ears, your phantom bravery is dry with each tender void, last-minute kips slung from gargoyle horns to rodeo, Sunday wants to see our sadness stripped of blackberry light, the radio reports silence, your undercooked voice spreads down to terrestrial clouds, my pelvis is an open beak we feel our throats slicked with pine cider & arsenic, animals native to our country are caught in copper armature, I have no system of taxonomy for our slow dance, there is no Binomial nomenclature for moving limbs, I ate every inch of mulch & froze tiny animals with my breath for our campfire. our bodies, two grapefruits of tinsel pulp
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Moving Picture Diva
	startled cement trucks turning heavily with mid-morning yellow waste their halos on her broken jukebox song there is only one way to remember a burned photograph practice sightseeing with a faceted object stuck in your telescope practice recreating your life in death your death in life dream of her scene by scene a moving still life all posh with mascara deltas & alcohol heavy piss chestnut flavored chlorine a puddle in the heart that refuses to dry play dead with cap guns play dead on her award nominee carpet remind her of the plane crash carpet with its safety lights much like this crisscrossed with belligerent hummingbirds & damaging olive pits there are crayfish in the disco ball she may be fifteen years older but when you danced there was no emergency off ramp to quell gravity’s industrial plow her eight days of dying outlined with midnight with mosquito bites with oil spills never felt real among the draped bougainvillea mangrove rum lush poverty
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JOSEPH MULHOLLAND’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Subliminal Interiors, Anomalous Press, Heavy Feather Review, Rabbit Catastrophe Review and Yes, Poetry. He currently lives in San Juan, where he is a graduate student in the University of Puerto Rico’s Department of Comparative Literature. He continues to be a diehard Pogues fan.

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