I tap at the alphabet while a single deer taps at the dirt beyond the brush on the far side of the tree line.
Mostly he ate what was put on his plate snuck coffee grounds or dirt for a snack Once a zipper Unzipped
The collective failure of ethical standards
my friends’ fathers are dropping I mean dying like flies
Even as the sun warms the concrete the long nights’ sensual cold lingers in my clothes.
You are strange, my mother said, dwelling on the past.
I have observed, the theorist I am
Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”
If my life was the size of my arm, I would stretch it out for you.
how does an afternoon turn on its axis?
I slumped in front of a massive desk, a passive patient corroded with failure and dread.
I am still waiting for the lion
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.
Any still figure at mid-late evening, when the long shadows make even crumbs appear arranged like furniture.
Try not to see your own predicament in every fucking thing.
The poetry of Brian S. Ellis unravels, inverts, investigates, and complicates. His poems are radical koans and invitations to forego common narratives.
Now that the Israeli has left, it falls on me to make the salad.
a folksome, gruesome opera of gauze and malcontent.
Okay, picture this: We’re in an elevator. The elevator shuts down. It doesn’t matter where we’re going, only that we’re alone.
Long after midnight, we’re talking about our first time