I suffer visions and many indignities while looking for the Lobster
Lights on the dashboard spell out “You still can’t kiss me”
Any still figure at mid-late evening, when the long shadows make even crumbs appear arranged like furniture.
The collective failure of ethical standards
my love is a glass shard, a knife made of madness and moonlight, and there are already way too many fragments in this house
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 sin is existing.
four-thirty a.m.
Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”
I have an axe with hearts gashed
anger, like you can sink teeth into, candy apple
I slumped in front of a massive desk, a passive patient corroded with failure and dread.
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.
He has stories that I am not in anymore. It’s healed this way.
Even from this distance I could go out the door it would bang shut and crumble
You said it was okay to blame what goes wrong on the planet
The poetry of Brian S. Ellis unravels, inverts, investigates, and complicates. His poems are radical koans and invitations to forego common narratives.
You are strange, my mother said, dwelling on the past.
If America is Babylon / and you are an exile / newly arrived among pagans / Catholic, ‘Ngolan, Black, woman / you already know how to pray