Empty vessels make the most sound, I think, as you rip the fairy lights off the handrail.
Live the rest of your life from one worst case to another.
I am still waiting for the lion
Even as the sun warms the concrete the long nights’ sensual cold lingers in my clothes.
I have an axe with hearts gashed
Listen to me: I know the winter gloom in mid-summer…
People have always coped with flooding, and they learned to cope with death.
anger, like you can sink teeth into, candy apple
I imagined a cascade of slow death for all / that mattered…
Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”
The sin is existing.
my friends’ fathers are dropping I mean dying like flies
this is what I want you to to see: leaves falling because it is too late for them not to
four-thirty a.m.
I don’t know why I’m in the garden kneeling on dirt
The storm passes without snow. The car waits loyally in the back lot.
my love is a glass shard, a knife made of madness and moonlight, and there are already way too many fragments in this house
I tap at the alphabet while a single deer taps at the dirt beyond the brush on the far side of the tree line.
The poetry of Brian S. Ellis unravels, inverts, investigates, and complicates. His poems are radical koans and invitations to forego common narratives.