Four Poems

A NEIGHBOR DRUMMING

A neighbor            drumming is a lover
or a likeness           a glossary
of the hard consonants keeping time

I too repeat myself        but don’t change

Replace my syllable with a snare
I am describing to no one the sound of

rain fall           footfall           a far off war

PAULINE OLIVEROS

Music of an other kind
                                            Pauline Oliveros

has heron wings
& whale teeth

A female animal lesbian for the revolution

                                            Place me in a cistern
Play an accordion             underneath the world
Watch it decay

Write your decibels onto a “pillar”

           Names I slowly say
           into the room

becoming not names becoming earth names

ROTARY TELEPHONE TURNED

Rotary telephone turned
weepy microphone

Favorite object to speak into amid
a war

Sound is in me
muscles loud static

Rip into my heart
a bloody tape deck of syllables

Wind it back
& run it through
the delay delay delay
signal path
to clear the present

When will things
improve

When will
when will

CLASSICAL

Classical record on the other room’s record player
with bells to ring over a bathtub floating big
dead bells

My first poem
was a tape I found
under my sister’s bed

Box of magnetic tapes Writing

Silence I spoke into the microphone
like the child I was

The poem answered decades later
Listen what lost

∩

Nathan Shipley is a poet currently in Santa Cruz, CA. He does work for Insert Press and publishes SUDS, an audiozine for poetry and sound. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in GROTTO, Recenter Press Journal, and Opt West.