Her brown eyes, how a fig considers itself.
I suffer visions and many indignities while looking for the Lobster
Ghosts for hire, whispers in her mouth, cysts to feel, the symmetry of a gift.
The sin is existing.
I myself should never have been born
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.
The poetry of Brian S. Ellis unravels, inverts, investigates, and complicates. His poems are radical koans and invitations to forego common narratives.
Should have found a job by now; should have slept in the night; should have boiled old coffee before noon.
If my life was the size of my arm, I would stretch it out for you.
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.
People have always coped with flooding, and they learned to cope with death.
my love is a glass shard, a knife made of madness and moonlight, and there are already way too many fragments in this house
Any still figure at mid-late evening, when the long shadows make even crumbs appear arranged like furniture.
and then her eyes fully opened — blazed through with strands of mud
Even as the sun warms the concrete the long nights’ sensual cold lingers in my clothes.
I want to roll in this moment until I become its vocabulary until I smell like the bones until I am its echo…
We stop doing dishes while a mile unwinds from the tree outside.
Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”
Part of being a good sad person is always painting the shadows in the right direction and knowing what sorrow to art with.
I don’t know why I’m in the garden kneeling on dirt