Rb
Gabriel with a weary halo and diminished certainty. Gabriel
thinking I could have been a roofer. Back, pelvis and femur
in two places. But on my feet again in time for the dogwoods.
In time for the razing of McMansions. Then, of course, those
faulty models—tin fuselage and plastic wings—you wound
and wound and let go from the garage. The scientific method
was enough for you…that, and an aerial view of the neighbor’s
daughter sunning on the porch. Boombox Club Nouveau and
her father’s Budweiser and the cordless like a doll she no longer
cared for but made stay, anyway.
Hf
At the dirt market,
the painter of bottles
works small
and from the inside
with brushes
of eyelash.
He takes requests
but also keeps
a stock of cranes,
stoop-necked
and high-stepping
behind their screen
of rushes and also
mountain villages
materializing
from the fog.
He draws on a cigarette
as he works closer
to the center.
He has decided never
to paint the girl
fording the stream,
her few possessions
held above her head
as though they were
for the mauve
sky alone.
As
The radio intones that
A) we have eliminated rinderpest
and
B) a number of mushroom hunters are mistaking false morels
for the genuine thing
My friend says you can tell the difference right away
when your lower half doesn’t turn
into a bull’s nethers.
Man as bull.
Bull as man.
But also:
flower as catastrophe,
minnow as exception,
slime mold as jealous light.
I intended to finish the bestiary,
but the cattle of Kenya
kept falling over
with the ache in the side.
And to think
we started off wanting
things to be
just as they appeared.
Pretty soon,
we noticed
the morel has a dusky cousin.
We grew irritable,
the room stifling
with the odor of hay.
Benjamin Landry lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and daughter and is completing his MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan. He is the winner of the 2009 Columbia Journal Poetry Contest, and his work has appeared in Crazyhorse, [PANK] Online, Salamander, Sonora Review, Web Conjunctions and elsewhere. The poems featured here are taken from his manuscript structured on the periodic table of elements, Particle and Wave, which is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press Phoenix Poets Series. More information on the author and his work is available at benjaminlandry.wordpress.com.
