j o s h u a m a r i e w i l k i n s o n |
|
|
What Came Back Through the Night to Leave This Mark on Your Hands?
|
|
What Came Back Through the Night to Leave This Mark on Your Hands? |
|
A pain arrives through the apricot. A letter stapled to the horse’s jaw. Did you carry the ripped off screen-door all by yourself? How many millipedes were in the jar when you fell asleep? What receded in the night? A boy with leaves in his fists climbs into the cab of my truck when I’m filling up the tank & he says, How did you taste the river? |
|
Hunched under the bleachers & there was a wicked thunder over the stadium & across the crashed-in lake. Nobody really moves like their stormy shadow. Rain fingers its way into your quiet, into your empty tea cup. City of terns & kissed brats. Fungus in the smell of the windshield. I dragged you here for what you said to the file clerk through the letter slot. Now, what if the twin sisters answer your meat-hook prayers? What sort of room would develop you? Each number molts in your palm & rests there like a mirrored bird. You know the song about the gully drifter who hangs children by their feet from the trees to empty the copper from their pockets. & you will sing it, sing it, sing it. |
|
The rug concealed something & the messenger girl got down on her belly to discover what the lump in the rug was. But the dust burst into a cloud & covered her hair & eyebrows. In a haze her brothers, the small but mighty electricians of sleep, drew a box around her part of the bedroom with chalk & sawed out the wooden rungs of the ladder as they climbed it up & up. |
||
JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON's most recent book is Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (Iowa, 2006). Pinball Publishing released his first book, Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms, in 2005, and new poems are forthcoming in West Branch, Parthenon West Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Denver, Colorado where he is completing a phd and working on new books and a film. |
||