j o s h    f o m o n

from THOUGH WE BLED METICULOUSLY

[The frost patterning]

[the dance a wounding guilt]

[And away, an illegible wind]

                                The frost patterning
a simulacra intelligence
—spirited
like a flower.     She clasps my arms
      squeezes           my breadth a miraculous
snowline.                                It's as if we shout
                          joy
              furiously.

next

                        the dance
                                    a wounding guilt

                                                upwelling from the soles
      trodden to this                              spinning moment

                                    an energy

deliquescent.
The sun's impurities

            split into panes            of trees—

like mangled steel
a rawness of blood.
 

I began my reformation—late night in

the butter—buried there all confidence

quaking. I ventured to where my

outpouring became a rivulet a butterfly

in the breath. It's when sun will rise

against her skin—absent oath—

imprecation awake in the book.

Obscured it is the unsuspected menace

the key before shattering. The daring

vision of a sudden universe. In thought

we had written its limits—the page a

momentum in how we hold molecular

desire suffused in how to die.

 
                                                In the aftershock, a forest trembling.
            And you, here, kudzu, wrapping


                                    your want            on every errant limb.

next

And away, an illegible
            wind
—lost context of shape.

                                    Pure energy and echoing white.            Voluminous
            not understanding my feet digging

                                    in a semblance of gravitational sway

                                                            —how easy it is to turn
                        and see my arrival.                  Yet
 

The haptic transmits a sense of being

swallowed. Her cutaneous echoing. In

her I foraged a recovery. Blank like a

face left blank. A sculptor's neck rough

in incompletion. In her the grid of

streets was a map to new love and new

erosions of myself. In her I let my

flocks wander. The mind and its masks

became confessions to greater

infidelities. Growth became a callous on

my bones. In her I let indiscreet scars

mark a history of recapture. All those

risks we took to love.

 
                                                  my bearings like a tree dropping roots.
                                                            I cannot
                        see my next step
                                                  as if the sun were
                                                  shattered by a blanket

                                                                                                hewing a distance around my feet.
                                    (                                    Only in moments
                                    when a body flounders in crisis.)

next

JOSH FOMON curates the collaborative art journal Depaser with Colin Post and Burke Jam. His poems appear in Caketrain, Ilk, Phoebe, and iO. He currently resides in Iowa City, IA after spending a substantial amount of time in Missoula, MT and Washington, DC.

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