Three Poems

from Plane2

/.

in every stance a vocabulary
transcends elation

you winter on foment vocabulary

if a describe sunset there will never be s

one
poet has a feeling of gut

life sciences explain wisdom
thought
training vocabulary
to be free in orderliness
like trees on crab gravity

horseshoe domain slitness
cadaver wisdom tooth
ancient money brain tooth
slitness, bereaved

clandestine figures, blue stalks, tall, gathered
in text
blood of blue dream

floating upward auto next to wanting code
screaming upside down the fiber trim

how fashionable to be Zen, completely
irrevocable
understanding
sweetness of a threat

/.

when someone has to read against rhythm of a dynamite sky
then
there is no poem

when someone has to tell excellent
switchings of a fiery brain stem
then
clouds gather rain

when the feather has no size

when your mantra is to be feather

then
Sinatra

when the covered bridge
time has escaped my serene attention

in the basement
time has slept underneath my breathing anus

water crest has black black black
resonance
Stanley make it black black
resonance field black black

/.

this paper feels very nice
like an image
of vertigo

no logic
no more of that

it was like there had been a line
in print
in the museum

stairs like tundra
elephants
with spear and grizzle

lemonade of the nights
turns on the hallway
water fountain
and there goes that lizard again

I wonder if that makes me eligible to enter the museum
on account of the fact
that at age 2
I saw my parents
through the fog of something else

a koi pond

this is true
they were there with blurry hands-on-knees
and I thought
I used to know people
kind of like those people

∩

Michael Watkins is a poet from Pennsylvania. Under the pseudonym Ricky Salmonhunter, he has published two chapbooks: Underbellies of the Ancient Cube Trick (Spiral Editions, 2023) and PASTORALLLL (2022). Online, his work has also appeared in Cleveland Review of Books and Keith, LLC. He lives in Philadelphia.