Four New Apps

#1514

You can't
get it when
you want it,
but when I
want it I get
it; she rolled
over on her
belly, which
was very full,
and slept; its
just shadows
on the wall, I
thought, dark.


#565

Battle for deliverance,
struggle for salvation,
Christ's passion condensed
into ten fluid seconds,
sections of flesh leaving,
sense of "Geist" overhead.
Yet you've shrunk before
Romance into "post-
everything entropy," so
even the love of one's
life becomes another show,
rigged like a government's
actions, glommed onto
deadly ennui. Christ.


#1601

What words get sent up
on sharp frequencies are
fractious, bent from pain,
Hephaestus in iron-groans,
what goes up sticks around,
so that base/top get covered,

all things resonate like pitch-
forks, tweaked by conductors
before their final, triumphant
performance for a hall empty
of bodies, filled to capacity.


#1604

Here's where shifts (red shifts)
happen in perspective, I thought,
slopping dark meat onto my plate,
here's where angles converge to
put me past the nest. General
laughter over pictures, womb-
like spaces, but I was in hers as
I was in with them. It hurts, but
he's dead, I never met him. It's
a shame, I never met him. Blood
moves through air: between her,
me, them— leaves on concrete.


P.S. Earlier Apparition Poems, from Beams/Jacket 31, in The & Now Awards Anthology: The Best Innovative Writing, from Lake Forest College Press, in conjunction with Northwestern University Press. And being taught at the University of Oregon by John Witte.