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…
Ghosts for hire, whispers in her mouth,
cysts to feel, the symmetry of a gift.
and apples, mackintosh mostly, but any kind left in The Pub
at the Assisted Living Place
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.
here is the sky in stop motion, flickering,
a still shot in monochrome
We found in his suitcase T-shirts, his siddur, gifts he bought for his grandchildren…
I like to think I’m also sprung,
released from the furnace knocks,
done with the heavy meat stews
and salty soups.
I buy too much, for someone of my stature.
could pawn a skinny metaphor to purchase a plump skin.
its reputed in our lineage— to daydream a life that shreds our pockets.
You let the yellow glow
from eye sockets. The building up the street
is burning faster and faster.
The poetry of Brian S. Ellis unravels, inverts, investigates, and complicates. His poems are radical koans and invitations to forego common narratives.
If America is Babylon / and you are an exile / newly arrived among pagans / Catholic, ‘Ngolan, Black, woman / you already know how to pray