/merrillcole/

 

Around my head the ghost face rolls,

unsteady halo, stolen gold,

radioactive discharge

burning off, all I could never

bring myself to bless. Lopsided man,

 

can you say or guess what fig leafs

your cold nakedness, the half-life

of quarter-loves, shadow figures

against the wall—all man, or

maybe doll? Who cannot touch

 

himself, whose pleading seems record

of an instrument that scrapes off crust

of sentiment, that wind-up talk:

I want to swallow you, I will

peel away your wings. The wet grin

 

slides into my undefended

mouth. Staccato laughter rings out:

hot spit flying into emptiness,

biohazard semen and piss.

This upbeat ballad played backwards,

 

phantom twin, an automaton

bruising out the numbers again,

x-ray trespass, you cannot see,

curse lipped in the mirror, warmer

brother—ultraviolet—almost me.

 

HIV Here & Now (20 November 2016).

 

Across ice fields, forks

malice, blue hand famishing,

unable to fist. Each thump

well-salted, holds stung

 

The coarse string. Strand

drifters, unbendable finger,

forward, ho! A string

of snow somewhere, bone

 

Bright circlets, latch

oyster dreams. Sand crack

infinity’s flush aperture.

That sequester galls.

 

Vagrant passengers squander

rondels from the sea. Call

overboard! Sure sinker,

your envoy stings. Weeds

 

Ooze no numb treasure.

Dank anchored chafe.

Unsanitary catch: wire basket

jellied, the blood libels sing.

 

Women’s Studies Quarterly 45:1&2 (Spring/Summer 2017): 190-191.

 

 

the blind spot

the secret of that con

centration grinding

until the scratches

or paint

strokes or pinpricks o

pen a space (it hurts)

 

won’t be words

won’t be clouds

 

he can’t contain his

face his

fingers poking

out of his mouth

of his eyes (please

don’t) his vagina

 

won’t take body

won’t hold soul

 

flesh-colored fingers  

hang down he’d say

seeing is not the

same as (fuck you)

touching

 

won’t cream

won’t bleed

 

blazes out of

art out of reach

of red (I can’t fucking

see) neon

flashing Johnny and

Johnny again

 

“Johnny in Lights.” Spoon River Poetry Review 42.1 (Summer 2017): 36-37.

 

When I was a boy, the confectioner of mixed feelings had not yet opened his shop, mice waiting to gnaw encrusted corners, the paying customers feeling a little dirty. Shadows were more distinct and irony, an unknown country.

When I was a boy, the fever washed in and out. Sometimes it sounded sad, like a seashell held to the ear. I knew, of course, the sea wasn’t really there, that I wasn’t drowning at all. What he whispered didn’t seem quite so,

“You will miss this when you grow up.” Not the sticky hand inside my shorts, nor the hush money, but a horizon where something lay waiting just for me, the lynxes at alphabet’s end.

When I was a boy was an analogue for “when I was a boy,” 45 I could play and play until I was nothing but scratches and pops. The fever broke. I couldn’t taste the dirt and sugar, just a green seasick I couldn’t throw up.

He told me the words, “when I was a boy,” are a prompt for nostalgia, as if the shadows could turn back into ghosts. Yesterday closed its eyes, and the sea has lost its echoes.

The Good Men Project (September 2017).

It’s not that no one will hear it. It’s not that her lips can’t move, or his eyes won’t close tight. All the lights stay on, as if the audition never ends.

Unable to catch himself in the mirror, he’s afraid no one sees him. In the next scene, lying in an open field, he waits for dawn to reveal the burn marks of his disappearance.

Her film is the silent one. She loops the cloth around her arm. After her mouth has moved, someone we don’t see puts on placards the words she didn’t say.

Switch the channel, please. The blood is flowing off-screen. There is a field in Iraq, in Gaza, an airfield near Kabul. There is red meat for the dinner table.

You can’t be too careful, with the camera recording. Tuck in your napkin. You might be the star. In this scene, you kiss him greedily. In the next, you drive a stake into her heart.

Two women kissing, and the film bombed. No, the field was bombed, my close-up taken. These gestures of solidarity have become clichéd, as though the blood meant nothing.

How many striking ways to drive home the same point. How to be dreamy always. How many air strikes. The scene is set. The extras are shooting up. All your lines will have to be improvised.

The Main Street Rag 23:2 (Spring 2018): 48; Creative Resistance (July 2017).

 

show me the shut faces in

faces in shadow

in shadow show me

shut

 

over what she was saying

he was saying saying you

lend me your tongue or

your time again

 

your tongue or your life

or lend me your life

and it’s time

no face to stop it

 

time to say no

face to stop it

only the noose say no

only the noose knows

 

she didn’t say you said

she set

wet pieces of shudder wet

pieces of shudder

 

for sale you were saying

red roses wet

pieces of he said

for sale pieces

 

set

 

Cutbank Literary Journal (November 15, 2019).

 

makes sidelong

allusion throwing bouquets

to those who get it

catch the exemplary

pain razor-

thin metonyms of injustice

pointing at what happens

to some people in some

cut and cut

off far away places

 

got caught

in a personal syntax of I did

this I did that not implying

I could do anything but re-

member rearrange

the wildflowers all correctly

named with a flourish

 

don’t say Forget-Me-Not

don’t say Gaza

don’t say Baltimore

 

Spoon River Poetry Review 42.1 (Summer 2017): 38.

 

The knock of pale

death at the front door no longer

sets the heart pounding. Carpe diem

has become a poor alibi

for reckless behavior. Shouldn’t he

consider investing for retirement,

stocks and bonds

with those he loves?

What about the new husband?

 

The modernist imperative

that poetry be impersonal and make

Classical allusion had been

a defense mechanism

against the story, relentlessly

rammed home, where the hero

dies. Notice no “I”

in that sentence, not, or no longer,

a death sentence. Would that the self

blissfully not reappear.

 

The poet with HIV

might have resisted confessing

the purple details ad nauseum,

collecting notices he couldn’t pay,

when not well enough to work,

the men on the streets noticing

the bruises on his shins

as he sauntered by.

 

He might have suspected

turning the dead men he

had once fucked into the heroes

of stories that he would tell,

would be to make phallic

monuments to himself, would be

to betray them (whose breath

heats the back

of his neck as he writes).

 

Metro Weekly (July 29, 2021): 37; Spoon River Poetry Review 42.1 (Summer 2017): 39-40.

 

Man was for us the culture without the glitter and the pearls. Man was for us the poetry jammed up and starting to stammer. Man was the mirage of marching forward. The mirage of murder. Man was good in training. Man was enough for it. Man was shooting stars or bullets, all for the sense of awe.

 

With man everything was restrained, except pointing to the hurt places. The hurt places as seen in mirrors from every side. As none of us could see. With man every murder meant a little boy deserving love. Love was a mirage moving forward, with dryness in the mouth and blisters.

 

Man was never dead enough to bury, but man was swallowing his poison hard. Man was resolution and a lack of perspective. Man was following an obsolete map, stumbling in the desert with the rest of us far behind. Man was the solitary icon. Man was the glower between a cigarette and a horse.

 

Man said, let’s not tell anyone. Man said, it’s only physical. Man shot first and the questions later. Man fell asleep after. Man didn’t hear because the alphabet was shaking loose. The stars were shaking loose like glitter. Man might have been beautiful, but my camera wouldn’t stop shaking.

 

Denver Quarterly 56:1 (2021): 48.

 

 

tulip through the tip toes leaf

over clover for a looking

 

bye bye say butterfly’s

spots rubbed

 

over tongue saying not yet

neither diphthong nor divot

 

“this is you and this is

you and you and me”

 

saying every baby

loves my body don’t nobody

 

love little old apple me

don’t sit under

 

the “it was me” caught

on the hinge of hearing

 

be or might be

 

Lotus Eater Magazine 15 (Fall/Winter 2022): https://lotuseatermagazine.files.wordpress.com/2022/05/lotus_eater_issue_15.pdf