Aught, no. 14 (2005)


Brad Flis

Flamingo Tones

step quickly untrue step
the fink in the dispatch
anything settles, then settles
in, I’m already in it

strep theory of upset
accuse & accuser
reddening sting & fiat
the cosmosing land rover

& I’m already on it
migrant & mill-nape
rejuvenated muzzle & overexert
the ensembles tuck you

in, act wicked, so there
can be another english
dead bodies curl, explaining your
version, pretzel-shaped

pretty, disperse & discourage
I owe you a wind-blow
how do you spell your name
ell-em-en-oh-pee

limp again culprits
address & distresser
breast of the Ptolemies
witch-hazel in quad

 

The Beginning of Anything As Plateau

In the unlikely event of Turkish, you surface with grocers winking at your extremities, knowing only new and deluxe editions.
Despite the particles of Turkish, you lose touch with umbilical affiliates, make space suits from tercets.
For the purpose of Turkish, weren’t you garnish, brimming the half-moon’s bright drinking cup?
To the next generation of Turkish, you recover the boulevards with tranquil darts.
From the extracted serum of Turkish, your legs, nimble and unsheathed, lamp the floodlights searching for our bodies, sunk in a ravine.
Since the brotherly embrace of Turkish, you lob geese into the lake, call it rain.
With only/but the exordium of Turkish, a good time may suggest calamity, unpleasantness, and great harm, but often mere unpleasantness.
When questioning the dictums of Turkish, you sculpt your body into milk jugs, ditched wings, frenched inside a navel orange.
Thus probing the numerals of Turkish, you explode and keep the Christian printer toner for yourself, if not to generate seedlings, then to feel wet and ashamed in denim jeans.
Because of Turkish, you jerk back. When you envisage proto-planets, the burnt heretic skates your laps unhopelessly.
By the magistrates of Turkish, you gully the platal clerks with gauze, giving us up for dead.
If containing the span of Turkish, you align yourself with heavy epaulettes, give breath to pliant foxglove in known climates.
Not yet reaching the rim of Turkish, you harangue the sault as though brandishing contours or distingue nudes before a consul.

 

A Christmas Wasp

This weather brings on an alien gloss
ten thetas
no conversion of glass
girdled saint, ten inabilities. Re-signal.

We subtract, en route, the unrelenting

visionaries from flagstones
does not the nympha liberate

its broken headlamp, slick roads
to ponder? Rainbirds
canonize the rain
catalogue face-changes in clouds.
Autonomous, they whistle. Clouds

evacuate the standing vessel
from a vantage point, violas
loosening young air like garments
lit stoves.
We are almost in St.
Étienne, windows tasting of salt.

 


Copyright © 2005, by the author. All rights reserved.
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