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We hadn’t got color up till then. And if I had a nickel, why, that was for milk. Milk money: the money a body gained. Was just me on that hillside and the kite, red & white waked up into the wind. Hardly anybody knew me then. Oh, Lord how quickly the things of this world came and went. Practically the first thing I notice when I get back. Wind, and I am lifted. Wind and I am hauled ahead by string and air. The bows sinuate the air, I hear them tatter. A certain kindness to that hill, its slope gone gaily green against the eve and oh, the tail dipped; the string slipped. Uppity huff and drag of hawk air plundering eggs in the sparrow’s nest. You left this fragment, this bit of shell behind.

the archive dance of frank gehry crumples to the sky its finger and walking bridge. the mummers disappear my city sounds. dance crumples to the archive sky of fela. the breaking public crush a lot and pilgrimage from greenville (to farmville) to ruleville up the road. let me place Mrs. Hamer, who crush like an architect outside, like broke composition, in parchman. lula and helena strayed to the dock, founded the hiding republic of the westside trucks to come (inland curving bridge, endless waterways) dragged the repeating public folds into the open work we made, unembarrassed with children, out of the expanse’s closed walls from Béère’s market to black saturday, loved by old hands, the breaking law of movement of farms like wagon wheels to christopher street and dim lights on the edge of abeokuta, mississippi, damn. “we may not have a home to call our own but we’re gonna make it”

do you remember the first time you were called annoying? how your breath stopped short in your chest the way the light drained from your eyes, though you knew your cheeks were ablaze the way your throat tightened as you tried to form an argument that got lost on your tongue? your eyes never left the floor that day. you were 13. you’re 20 now, and i still see the light fade from your eyes when you talk about your interests for “too long,” apologies littering every other sentence, words trailing off a cliff you haven’t jumped from in 7 years. i could listen to you forever, though i know speaking for more than 3 uninterrupted minutes makes you anxious. all i want you to know is that you deserve to be heard for 3 minutes for 10 minutes for 2 hours forever. there will be people who cannot handle your grace, your beauty, your wisdom, your heart; mostly because they can’t handle their own. but you will never be and have never been “too much.”

Drowned together in his car in Lake Chippewa. It was a bright cold starry night on Lake Chippewa. Lake Chippewa was a “living” lake then, though soon afterward it would choke and die. In the bright cold morning after we could spy them only through a patch of ice brushed clear of snow. Scarcely three feet below, they were oblivious of us. Together beneath the ice in each other’s arms. Jean-Marie’s head rested on Troy’s shoulder. Their hair had floated up and was frozen. Their eyes were open in the perfect lucidity of death. Calmly they sat upright. Not a breath! It was 1967, there were no seat belts to keep them apart. Beautiful as mannequins in Slater Brothers’ window. Faces flawless, not a blemish. Yet—you could believe they might be breath- ing, for some trick of scintillate light revealed tiny bubbles in the ice, and a motion like a smile in Jean-Marie’s perfect face. How far Troy’d driven the car onto Lake Chippewa before the ice creaked, and cracked, and opened like the parting of giant jaws—at least fifty feet! This was a feat like his 7-foot-3.8-inch high jump. In the briny snow you could see the car tracks along the shore where in summer sand we’d sprawl and soak up sun in defiance of skin carcinomas to come. And you could see how deftly he’d turned the wheel onto the ice at just the right place. And on the ice you could see how he’d made the tires spin and grab and Jean-Marie clutching his hand Oh oh oh! The sinking would be silent, and slow. Eastern edge of Lake Chippewa, shallower than most of the lake but deep enough at twelve feet to suck down Mr. Dupuy’s Chevy so all that was visible from shore was the gaping ice wound. And then in the starry night a drop to -5 degrees Fahrenheit and ice freezing over the sunken car. Who would have guessed it, of Lake Chippewa! Now in the morning through the swept ice there’s a shocking intimacy just below. With our mittens we brush away powder snow. With our boots we kick away ice chunks. Lie flat and stare through the ice Seeing Jean-Marie Schuter and Troy Dupuy as we’d never seen them in life. Our breaths steam in Sunday-morning light. It will be something we must live with— the couple do not care about our astonishment. Perfect in love, and needing no one to applaud as they’d been oblivious of our applause at the Herkimer Junior High prom where they were crowned Queen and King three years before. (In Herkimer County, New York, you grew up fast. The body matured, the brain lagged behind, like the slowest runner on the track team we’d applaud with affection mistaken for teen mockery.) No one wanted to summon help just yet. It was a dreamy silence above ice as below. And the ice a shifting hue—silvery, ghost-gray, pale blue—as the sky shifts overhead like a frowning parent.What! Lake Chippewa was where some of us went ice-fishing with our grandfathers. Sometimes, we skated. Summers there were speedboats, canoes. There’d been drownings in Lake Chippewa we’d heard but no one of ours. Police, fire-truck, ambulance sirens would rend the air. Strangers would shout at one another. We’d be ordered back—off the ice of Lake Chippewa that shone with beauty and onto the littered shore. By harsh daylight made to see Mr. Dupuy’s 1963 Chevy hooked like a great doomed fish. All that privacy yanked upward pitiless and streaming icy rivulets! We knew it was wrong to disturb the frozen lovers and make of them mere bodies. Sweet-lethal embrace of Lake Chippewa But no embrace can survive thawing. One of us, Gordy Garrison, would write a song, “Too Young to Marry But Not Too Young to Die” (echo of Bill Monroe’s “I Traced Her Little Footprints in the Snow”), which he’d sing with his band the Raiders, accompanying himself on the Little Martin guitar he’d bought from his cousin Art Garrison when Art enlisted in the U.S. Navy and for a while it was all you’d hear at Herkimer High, where the Raiders played for Friday-night dances in the gym, but then we graduated and things changed and nothing more came of Gordy’s song or of the Raiders. “TOO YOUNG TO MARRY BUT NOT TOO YOUNG TO DIE” was the headline in the Herkimer Packet. We scissored out the front-page article, kept it for decades in a bedroom drawer. (No one ever moves in Herkimer except those who move away, and never come back.) The clipping is yellowed, deeply creased, and beginning to tear. When some of us stare at the photos our hearts cease beating—oh, just a beat! It was something we’d learned to live with— there’d been no boy desperate to die with any of us. We’d have accepted, probably—yes. Deep breath, shuttered eyes—yes, Troy. Secret kept yellowed and creased in the drawer, though if you ask, laughingly we’d deny it. We see Gordy sometimes, and his wife, June. Our grand- children are friends. Hum Gordy’s old song to make Gordy blush a fierce apricot hue but it seems cruel, we’re all on blood thinners now.

gustave morin's primary form is the collage poem. His "toon tune" is a remarkable piece of craftsmanship. Its sixty-three individual fragments of text are cut into the shapes of jigsaw puzzle pieces and are fit perfectly together in a rectangular grid. The "words" of the poem consist almost entirely of the extravagant visualizations of onomatopoeia from comic books, producing a visual symphony of crashes and cries.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>

He was tall, lean, serious about his profession, said it disturbed him to see mismatched teeth. Squinting, he asked me to turn toward the light as he held an unglazed crown by my upper incisors. With a small brush he applied yellow, gray, pink, violet and green from a palette of glazes, then fired it at sixteen hundred degrees. We went outside to check the final color, and he was pleased. Today the dentist put it in my mouth, and no one could ever guess my secret: there’s no one quite like me, and I can prove it by the unique shade of the ivory sculptures attached to bony sockets in my jaw. A gallery opens when I smile. Even the forgery gleams.

Two men share one tooth. From one tooth the men predict the world. Thank you! or we would not exist. Two men and one tooth is not a problem. One man is wide and one man is sober. Sometimes the men are the same. Little tooth is the light of the orchard. From it all things are made up. Once the two men lost the tooth and every one disappeared. No one was angry because no one was there. The men found the tooth when the tooth started laughing. The men said what is that noise and the world came back on. They told the tooth that’s not funny but it was very funny. One man swallowed the tooth and put on all the sad knowledge. He wanted to punish the tooth but the tooth punished him. It lasted three hours and then he threw up. The two men live in a cave with bay windows. To be in love is so solemn think the two men once a year. The tooth never thinks any thing. It is the tooth of a goat.

Last night when I was sound asleep, My little brother Keith Tiptoed into my bedroom And pulled out all my teeth. You’d think that I would be upset And jump and spit and swear. You’d think that I would tackle Keith And pull out all his hair. But no!   I’m glad he did it. So what if people stare. Now, thanks to the Tooth Fairy, I’ll be a millionaire!

Topeka, half the moon is rotten with shadows pooling in the Sea of Topeka. Topeka, where first I wet my brain with a 40oz bottle of Topeka. Topeka, is place name, is damn shame, is a mirror made of sand & Topeka. Topeka, you are substandard. I am not. Yet I’m the one on my hands & knees, searching for the lost keys in the prairie grass, ripped on acid, loving the fallacy that the black keys equal melancholy, the black keys being Topeka. Topeka, miscast capital, you’re no more political than a handshake with your dream-self upon waking, in my case dream-self lives & dies in Topeka. Topeka, the sickness cannot be cured of Topeka. Topeka, tigers laze about the yards, a man with a box balanced on his head, his possessions stuffed to brimming, trots down Topeka Ave. Topeka, the sickness will go unnoticed. The vaccine is composed of rare sentiments, the kind that love & hate with equal abandon, love & hate, love & hate, love & hate. Topeka. Topeka, there was a night when the moon didn’t appear but it appeared everywhere else in the world, what happened that night? Topeka? Topeka, I fear for your life, the intersection of 29th & California is a portal to Hell. I died there twenty times in my youth. Today, driving through, I toss a bouquet of roses to mark my third death, the one that had a soundtrack I can’t shake free. My sister sings it from the shower every morning. Forecast calls for occasional showers, with the possibility of late-morning sleet, in Topeka. Topeka, cast off the reliquaries! Call your men to war! Me?  I’ll be tugging one last hit from the bong I fashioned out of the shrapnel of Topeka. Topeka, pop. rarely exceeds one, as in each trip home happens in rewind, stepping back across the creek, bird in hand throwing up the worm, further back, unbreaking  its wing, bird flying off as if resurrected but from among the living, there I am, eight years old, seven, six, now a slug of semen sucked back into my father, now, as the waters roll back across the plains toward the river, a dog coughs up water, lifts its head, sees nothing, puts its head back down, this, Topeka, is your history, although it never happened.

I cannot know twisted Henriette of the plant kingdom Engrafted with a crutch. And yet her bulbous concerns Effuse a solid blue from inside, Like a steel Dryad, and her gaze effaced Shines with distended power. Otherwise These clusterjewels would not dazzle us so, As limbs proliferate through her pulped brain From dendrites where creation flared And this crippled tree would seem defaced, J’Accuse! beneath the lace of this clipped sister And would not glisten in synaptic blasts Would not, from all the reaching boughs of self, Burst like ripe sapphires:for here there is no place That does not see you. You shake forth a nest.