Plain Language
The path by which you entered is barred to you. Grazed by a low eye, scarps of oak bark lump in a lunar mantle. My frailty catches a dagger in the engineering of any leaf. My deficit narrative is an egg-hauling ant. Oleo has its boons but, meanwhile, few of them are molten. Porridge sucks salt off the pastoral bakeware every civilized orphan ever supped from. You can’t hear that you can hear it, but I’m hawking an autopsied tongue. The egg deflates. The ant is a sedan—2 door, a humbug mattress bungeed to its roof—reincarnate. The way out is infinitely wide and branches ad nauseam. In other words, those aren’t opposing slopes aflame with grapes. Those are just saw horses trampling journeymen hagglers.
Plain Language
A cloud dons a mouse’s coat. A stout oud overdoses on Morrissey. A gouache caution stops a blacktop from coming clean. A subterfuge downgrades a tuition’s endometrium. A ballistic ras el hanout frisks a San Marzano. An icicle starves a charcoal acorn. A durian ladles such buttery epoxy. A spineless motor filigrees a Boolean lithium. A sweater accredits a honeyed weep. An outcry dabbles in Hangman on a gecko’s foot.
Plain Language
The skins the abhorrent beat could always be shabbier. A bull rules altar calls for angel shots non-canonical. My poor occlusion wipes fractions with the same irony as strontium. A mossy sap dwarfs towheads spoiling for bottle rockets. Flashback to: grimy signatures overcorrecting for déjà vu’s wow and flutter. One crystallization roves among galactically transparent nonsense. Should an odd chorus break through, will bottoming stall in the black market of a python’s eye? The preset gets stuck on buskers naked but for the aching that came after them. How frozenly their sharecropper’s poses ward.
Plain Language
My visa to the measure of your expectations is good for one anecdote only. The candle in the water closet doesn’t vouchsafe, but its natural fragrance is “Leverage.” I’m too intoxicated by the way coffee softens here. A succession of flapper dresses ushers me through fractionally more dazed checkpoints. A dream catcher cringes above a chartreuse panel’s switches and potentiometers. Against adagio handclaps, tapestries glissade in the style of a tottering citrus crate label. Shapelessness has begun to suffuse things I am wont to brush. Who now will halt my fall through the appeals I have no time to splutter?
Joe Milazzo is the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and three full-length poetry collections: The Habiliments (Apostrophe Books), Of All Places In This Place Of All Places (Spuyten Duyvil), and, in collaboration with Eric Lindley and Miwa Matreyek, Words In Danger Of Falling Out Of The Vocabulary (Galileo Press). His writings have also appeared in Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Heavy Feather Review, Prelude, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. He is also the Founder/Editor-in-Chief of Surveyor Books. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, where he was born and raised.
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Heavy Feather Review 