POETRY
“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
Any still figure at mid-late evening, when the long shadows make even crumbs appear arranged like furniture.
my love is a glass shard, a knife made of madness and moonlight,
and there are already way too many fragments in this house
the strands of your hair on the bathroom tiles aren’t sketching defeat. that’s you spitting disease in the face with another day you’ve woken up to.
Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”
I have an axe
with hearts gashed
I slumped in front of a massive desk, a passive patient corroded with failure and dread.
We found in his suitcase T-shirts, his siddur, gifts he bought for his grandchildren…
I like to think I’m also sprung,
released from the furnace knocks,
done with the heavy meat stews
and salty soups.
He has stories that I am not in
anymore. It’s healed this way.
Even from this distance I could go out
the door it would bang shut and crumble
The poetry of Brian S. Ellis unravels, inverts, investigates, and complicates. His poems are radical koans and invitations to forego common narratives.
If America is Babylon / and you are an exile / newly arrived among pagans / Catholic, ‘Ngolan, Black, woman / you already know how to pray