"Everyone I Knew In High School Is Dead" by Jules Cohen

Pop the berries with a pencil
then rest up, unhook
your neck from the tree
I slip coins into the slit in your thoughts
unlike a crippled branch
carried like a sling
Light fumbles the gun I can’t see
standing behind the metal
no I’m not so distant, turn around when
my name is called
Clear-paw, I know where to pin the eyes on
the experiment flicks to a formal
stratagem intact with danger-tint
Nothing lyric lives outside, sustains a
summer fire
In the yard 100 droplets slap
our heads unlike caution
Caught on a ragged apple,
you glint so I named you Speak,
slicked back in the wing-tense,
all my leaves so clean

From her new chapbook of the same title, which can be ordered here. Every poem in the chapbook has the same title.