Five Poems
Corridor
Corridors of grassland
kept incommunicado
somewhere where the reckless moon is
berthed only in sun’s oratory
Son of a bitch with syncopated smile
to spike across the raking black
die-gray dust splaying nighty pattycake
the light that laughs in its linty pockets
What sucked at the throat’s rivulets
spends with songbird’s glissading specie
sparse lumen with barter’s keep
pealing at its own vacuumed din
Splendor
Fit is occasioned of splendor
Laugh and pacify
where the sky, catalyzing
is a safe house
paying the passengers
for their balcony
of finished world ardor
what of exposure, governs
to hear itself
to seethe by winter’s
mottled traits
Ignition
Gray ignition rings the horizon
in paranoid style of mother nature
a bath of Permian gunmetal
Here your sky
a long emergency shear ravishing the strata
Learning
its agile eye thrown
primitive against living
Stride
The looker
gives the furniture its
Gunboat stride
A thing of alchemized global night
Next in line
the cotton from the sapper’s mouth
Collapsed
of the nearly beneficial
to have bundled their tithes
in nocturn’s press
Sweep
This is an ad hoc step
add millions
sweep its surface
a seamstress makes an oil slick gulf
with temper of antecedents
Lucidly
luck is depth
lucid is death
stitcher asks for its timing to share
the deft use of momentum
defusing over the jutted truss
What is it to drag out a victim
with the plump sutures
and the structure of state
the marrow of grammar listing in port
sky’d berth slept foregrounded ashen
to run in the toiling charade of delay
∩
Geoffrey Detrani is a visual artist and writer. His artwork is in private, public and museum collections. He is the recipient of multiple artists grants and residencies. He is a two-time recipient of the State of Connecticut Artists Fellowship award. He was the recipient of a World Views residency with a studio on the 91st floor of the former World Trade Center in New York City. His poems have been included in Fence, Aufgabe, Action Yes, New Orleans Review, Black Warrior Review, Parthenon West Review, Grotto, Broken Antler Magazine and Antiphony Press, among other publications, and are forthcoming in Ballast.