(Fernandez, Robert. We Are Pharaoh. Canarium Books, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-9822376-5-6. $14.)
✷
the flesh calls back its bulls
✷
This is also the context in which childhood attempts to recur.
✷
Avoid the participle and the bread-winning verb.
✷
An ocean plucks one, two, three, five, seven feathers from its flank
✷
Marietta:
your name in strawberry leaves.
✷
Not just the river but the shadow of the river travels.
✷
the vowels are infirm.
✷
& the soul goes up on the mountain
& the poem’s sex cruise
everyone on the beach should
take their bottoms off it’s
Dionysian it’s
relaxing
✷
the sun in tiers
✷
with your lovingly razor-thin feelers,
mr. mosquito
cleaning the trapdoor lashes of the eye
✷
no fun no longer
now the redheads
now I know
✷
I watched the sun
walk in its black wave
wash dirt from its hooves
exit the river
✷
if I were a husband
I would be a touch-sensitive lamp
✷
if I were a guitar placed in sunlight
I would close my hole
✷
the day undoes its belts
✷
Capable, like a boxer’s gloves, of mouth-watering speed
✷
The face, a portable blackboard (a child’s blackboard).
✷
How can we accommodate these reforms?
✷
I am staring up at a boxing match in which white Everlasts and red Everlasts take on the breakneck speed of cupids.
✷
split the uncooked potatoes on the table with a glance, and eat.
✷
Gets to the party.
Arrives at the party.
Arrives dead at the party.
✷
Cold blooded, we’ve come to get a look at you.
✷
THE ROOT
Being active, on the tips of its toes, forking, conversational
✷
being disaster and re-architect
✷
sleeving unity
✷
What moves along the course of the line must learn the single line
✷
Whither goest, Ruth in strange corn: the concise fft of levitation.
✷
Because we endeavor to end in a fuck-all of resolution:
✷
uninhibitedly pounded not yet sun
✷
from alpha-hydrangea to omega-white
✷
I was, I became, I preferred the sweep
✷
they feed you black radiance
from the run-off of the in-
curled, the sentient light.
✷
Cuts a water-wheel
from its body,
a jenny wheel,
Catherine wheels.
✷
The center
unravels no more easily
than a stone:
✷
you cannot uncut
The stomach: it is a die.
✷
A nurse raises
Her beak from my chest:
✷
It is midnight and I am speed cut
Into thirds of day;
✷
Woman with a rag for a heart,
child with rags for hands.
✷
The charge
leveled against us is that we are bodiless.
✷
tear the water up in veins
✷
The sun thins and that is its sound,
that is its speaking:
✷
become the tall,
the grey one in
perfumed black suit,
a host of death’s heads, cameras,
rubies surrounding me.
✷
Ever I believe,
ever I am loved
✷
small pyramids
mark the perimeter
✷
Or if I say damage, but you show that you are April; if I say damage and you are April in the midst of institutions,
✷
Gifted firecoral breezeway,
jackpots of rushing water.
✷
there, the sea in its crinkled introspection
of wilds, its maze and bladders.
✷
that we will die offends the dead
✷
am alive one last time today
✷
The lion that is the light and the meat stacked on the table.
✷
if a heap of rags is bread
✷
The one who is the key to these transactions enters the room. The one who is the key to these transactions enters
✷
We who eat at the table,
Speak at the table, see
At the table,
Are painful
Dilations and constrictions
✷
in its uprushing and poised sails, the moray
a little loaf of bread falling into slices
of its own volition . . .
✷
The smell of the spirit,
like wet clothes left
in the sun at the public pool,
is also the color of the confused,
the busy flag.
✷
Who is so human as to
know the thousand limbs, who is less
than human in this forum
✷
I wanted to
show you that here were all sorts of things
that might have been of use to you.
✷
incompossibility
