You said it was okay to blame what goes wrong on the planet
Lights on the dashboard spell out “You still can’t kiss me”
Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”
The storm passes without snow. The car waits loyally in the back lot.
The collective failure of ethical standards
Winter sat like a wolf on the horizon.
My grandmother asked, “Does it feel like being widowed?”
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…
I count my homes— those of my scattered youth the sanctuary of our young family the intermittent rest stops of apartments and vacations.
I want to roll in this moment until I become its vocabulary until I smell like the bones until I am its echo…
Mostly he ate what was put on his plate snuck coffee grounds or dirt for a snack Once a zipper Unzipped
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.
how does an afternoon turn on its axis?
I myself should never have been born
The poetry of Brian S. Ellis unravels, inverts, investigates, and complicates. His poems are radical koans and invitations to forego common narratives.
this is what I want you to to see: leaves falling because it is too late for them not to
you quit wearing pants loaf around your yard in hole-nipped panties
Millions of Americans have been affected by identity theft. It’s probably the greenhouse gases.
You’ve spent a lifetime training for this.
If my life was the size of my arm, I would stretch it out for you.