You want to kill the overture because it means winter will not last

like the field behind every mountain

it will take off in a truck and disappear behind an ocean.

Winter does last.

 

Summer exists juxtaposed but it gets clouded with

her mouth                  tastes like gulag

it is cold, and grey, and obsidian

 

every rusted baca lounger screams down mud highways;

one wonders where does a poem go when it is stuck inside an ear?

It becomes less about the shape and more about its clean lines

the interior inside of interior—

 

My house is patina with cleft palettes

and cabin-mates, the sea is made of wax

my house is a whale, under the Arctic

in the circle

 

Somewhere above are spirals of collective whispers

the garden is hot; the lawn is folding the laundry

folding my heart—no, the lawn must be a trampoline

launching and plummeting.

 

Where do you have to be today? With her past.

Melting into a dinosaur’s throat with purple carpet

because we are getting kicked out of the children museums, daily.

 

The rope-swing got me like a noose as it took down the rock

and my side was the rock.

 

The poem is forgetting about the ear. The poem is funambulist.

 

It is as though everyday was meant to be Sunday;

the world gets lazier and fat on its victims,

 

expels us like gas, and moons, and children.

We are waiting in the hall, waiting for the bathroom pass

tickets— a blank currency we wear on our eyes

but not on our chests.

 

Yellow bicycles landed in the water, packed in brown paper bags.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zachary Green, a New Hampshire native, is finishing his undergraduate B.A. degree in poetry at Columbia College Chicago. His work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review No. 23. He was a second place recipient of the Elma Stuckey Poetry award and is not at all neurotic.