POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
if detritus is all i’m made up of

my love is a glass shard, a knife made of madness and moonlight,
and there are already way too many fragments in this house

Clotheslines

Ma wrings
a wet world
of colors

Unerased | Steep Steps

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

Despairathon

You’ve spent a lifetime training
for this.

Drowning in sky

I have observed, the theorist
I am

books
Ode To the Dove Pt. V (Avrom Sutzkever)

I am still waiting for the lion

Getting Postcards From a Piano Showroom

The two of us toast to a man we both love, to whatever degree, clink our glasses and laugh…

painting of apple and grapes
Feast Of

anger, like you can sink teeth into, candy apple

Observer of the Patient

Her brown eyes,
how a fig
considers itself.

Existential

four-thirty a.m.

The love of my life moved from portland to new england

He has stories that I am not in
anymore. It’s healed this way.

Time Travel

I count my homes—
those of my scattered youth
the sanctuary of our young family
the intermittent rest stops
of apartments and vacations.

Aging Punks

Every so often, they add a tattoo
in honor of some long-forgotten love.

Vase

The storm passes without snow.
The car waits loyally in the back lot.

[Zoetrope with Particulates in it and a Newborn]

and then her eyes fully opened — blazed through with strands of mud

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.

The River

I myself should never have been born

Sadness is a Sin

If my life was the size of my arm, I would stretch it out for you.

The Kotel in Jerusalem is Filled with Cracks

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

Like dirt

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