Poetry: Jeff Pearson
all gorgeous objects found in the terror of your past
1. Ongoing whispers in your head.
2. Your howls.
3. All memorials for something.
4. You do not succeed in hefting up this bulk of matted fur.
5. The building of something and the razing of another.
6. Your taste of salt unsettled.
7. You pour out hieroglyphics of a hundred handprints, / the Fremont Indian Ruins of transpired / people coated in rock.
8. A camp of therapists who prescribe / intrusion.
9. You are haunted / by your own paranoia, to be caved-in on.
10. Cigarette butts in the grass, the grass under the green fleece.
11. That one chimney rock, / the limp part of you that can / only access nightmares of case studies / on your mal-behavior.
12. A messy affair.
13. Sorry they say, but they are not sorry—a serrated popsicle, a climbing clematis, a sorry / lozenge in the stomach of someone dead.
14. A home with no certain / pack, but renegades and ignoble beasts.
15. Garbage gargling in a trashcan.
16. A camp of therapists who prescribe / intrusion.
17. The souls of bees sold to lilacs where you bedded her.
18. A simple kept yard / destroying all loved ones, who made a difference.
19. Pills to correct pasts.
20. Track collars // distributed only to the feral, / your own kind, who, like you, / can only perceive rabid distemper / before it became your habitat. It prepares / you for departure, for the failed freedom / of an outpatient clinic.
21. A cow trapped in the man-hole.
Jeff Pearson is a graduate of the University of Idaho’s MFA Program and the author of the chapbook Sick Bed. He is a Neurodiversity advocate and is the managing editor of Blood Orange Review, the poetry editor for 5×5 Lit Mag, and an instructor at Washington State University. He tweets at @legoverleg.
Image: twitter.com
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