POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
Condolences

my friends’ fathers are
dropping
I mean dying
like flies

Getting Postcards From a Piano Showroom

The two of us toast to a man we both love, to whatever degree, clink our glasses and laugh…

Good Driver

Lights on the dashboard spell out
“You still can’t kiss me”

The River

I myself should never have been born

REVENGE SCENE

Okay, picture this: We’re in an elevator. The elevator shuts down. It doesn’t matter where we’re going, only that we’re alone.

Ode To the Dove Pt. VI (Avrom Sutzkever)

Yes I am guilty, I’m guilty. A sin was desirable then.
Bring the dancer back to the stalks.

Black Ghosts of Ponderosa on a Silhouette of Hill

Even as the sun warms the concrete
the long nights’ sensual cold lingers in my clothes.

Letter To a Young Poet

Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”

melting ice cap
blue is the color of surrender

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

All In

I don’t
know why
I’m in the garden
kneeling on dirt

There is an alternative universe

Ghosts for hire, whispers in her mouth,
cysts to feel, the symmetry of a gift.

Fallout Shelter

I imagined a cascade of slow death for all / that mattered…

Like dirt

this is what I want you to to see:
leaves falling because it is too late for them not to

[Zoetrope with Particulates in it and a Newborn]

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

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.

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.

close up of sun
Mercury in Retrograde

You said it was okay to blame
what goes wrong on the planet

i do not want to wait until it’s too late

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.

Back Suplex

Gravel-scatted hell &
we were blessed to be able
to hold on for even a heartbeat