POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
Electric Eels, Finishing School, Teeth

Millions of Americans have been affected by identity theft. It’s probably the greenhouse gases.

Fallout Shelter

I imagined a cascade of slow death for all / that mattered…

Like dirt

this is what I want you to to see:
leaves falling because it is too late for them not to

The River

I myself should never have been born

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.

Drowning in sky

I have observed, the theorist
I am

Me and Other Bodily Accessories

I am not a guide
for every traveler
of loss.

Unerased | Steep Steps

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

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.

i do not want to wait until it’s too late

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.

The Kotel in Jerusalem is Filled with Cracks

We found in his suitcase T-shirts, his siddur, gifts he bought for his grandchildren…

Soft Porn and Cuban Pine

It recommended
soft porn, as gentle prodding and petting parent
to parent might calm and soothe the kid.

Landscape with Ash

You are strange, my mother said, dwelling on the past.

Observer of the Patient

Her brown eyes,
how a fig
considers itself.

The Man

the man is stayed bent over the canvas
of my sofa. the man is me the man is him
self and I bring down the whip…

An Endeavor of Being Now

We stop doing dishes while
a mile unwinds
from the tree outside.

A Way of Seeing

Just starlight and some small scribbling across vinyl.

All In

I don’t
know why
I’m in the garden
kneeling on dirt

Letter To a Young Poet

Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”