POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
A Beautiful Thing

I want to roll in this moment until I become its vocabulary
until I smell like the bones
until I am its echo…

“Artifact,” as Translated from Gluberhöff’s Lexicon

Any still figure at mid-late evening, when the long shadows make even crumbs appear arranged like furniture.

oh Manifesto

The collective
failure
of ethical standards

The Kotel in Jerusalem is Filled with Cracks

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

Landscape with Ash

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

Sadness is a Sin

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

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.

Several someones

a folksome, gruesome opera
of gauze and malcontent.

robertson quay

how does an afternoon turn
on its axis?

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.

First

Long after midnight, we’re talking about our first time

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.

On the Night Row-Houses Across the Street Catch Fire

You let the yellow glow
from eye sockets. The building up the street
is burning faster and faster.

Finding My Fix

I slumped in front of a massive desk, a passive patient corroded with failure and dread.

Pit Stop in Kansas

we drove on through
the blue seal of morning as the turbines
turned and winked out their hearts

appetites

you quit wearing pants
loaf around your yard
in hole-nipped panties

Despairathon

You’ve spent a lifetime training
for this.

Lavandula

Listen to me: I know
the winter gloom in
mid-summer…