POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
Soft Porn and Cuban Pine

It recommended
soft porn, as gentle prodding and petting parent
to parent might calm and soothe the kid.

On the Night Row-Houses Across the Street Catch Fire

You let the yellow glow
from eye sockets. The building up the street
is burning faster and faster.

Several someones

a folksome, gruesome opera
of gauze and malcontent.

Going Broke

Winter sat like a wolf
on the horizon.

Condolences

my friends’ fathers are
dropping
I mean dying
like flies

[Zoetrope with Particulates in it and a Newborn]

and then her eyes fully opened — blazed through with strands of mud

Clotheslines

Ma wrings
a wet world
of colors

appetites

you quit wearing pants
loaf around your yard
in hole-nipped panties

Lavandula

Listen to me: I know
the winter gloom in
mid-summer…

Vase

The storm passes without snow.
The car waits loyally in the back lot.

Making Israeli Salad

Now that the Israeli has left, it falls
on me to make the salad.

robertson quay

how does an afternoon turn
on its axis?

The love of my life moved from portland to new england

He has stories that I am not in
anymore. It’s healed this way.

beach
On Undressing a Color / On Undressing a Girl

I imagine that undressing a color, though, would be so much like peeling a memory away from the grey and the white matter of your brain.

Landscape with Ash

You are strange, my mother said, dwelling on the past.

melting ice cap
blue is the color of surrender

you know that
baby swallows make silver ripples
in wild rivers to court reeds?

My Multiverses

It is the 70s. 1970s? 2570s? Who knows?
Audre and I have a penthouse in New York.

An Interview with Brian S. Ellis

The poetry of Brian S. Ellis unravels, inverts, investigates, and complicates. His poems are radical koans and invitations to forego common narratives.