POETRY
“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
Ghosts for hire, whispers in her mouth,
cysts to feel, the symmetry of a gift.
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.
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.
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…
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.
