POETRY
“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
The two of us toast to a man we both love, to whatever degree, clink our glasses and laugh…
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.
Yes I am guilty, I’m guilty. A sin was desirable then.
Bring the dancer back to the stalks.
Even as the sun warms the concrete
the long nights’ sensual cold lingers in my clothes.
Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”
you know that
baby swallows make silver ripples
in wild rivers to court reeds?
Ghosts for hire, whispers in her mouth,
cysts to feel, the symmetry of a gift.
and then her eyes fully opened — blazed through with strands of mud
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.
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.
