POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
Unerased | Steep Steps

My grandmother asked, “Does it feel like being widowed?”

heavy rain
The Plot

Long after midnight, we’re talking about our first time

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.

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.

melting ice cap
blue is the color of surrender

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

The State School 1984 His Given Name Was Wilbur  We Called Him Magpie

Mostly he ate what was put on his plate
snuck coffee grounds or dirt for a snack
Once a zipper Unzipped

woman at bar
After She Told Me You Pushed Her Down the Stairs

Empty vessels
make the most sound, I think,
as you rip the fairy lights off the handrail.

Hollywood Hills
the remarkable thing

I am still waiting for the lion

Condolences

my friends’ fathers are
dropping
I mean dying
like flies

Me and Other Bodily Accessories

I am not a guide
for every traveler
of loss.

Vase

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

Good Driver

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

[Zoetrope with Particulates in it and a Newborn]

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

robertson quay

how does an afternoon turn
on its axis?

Going Broke

Winter sat like a wolf
on the horizon.

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.

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…

“Artifact,” as Translated from Gluberhöff’s Lexicon

Any still figure at mid-late evening, when the long shadows make even crumbs appear arranged like furniture.

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.