One Poem

the shit eaters

“a mess of cockroaches that shun the light” “or the dreaded moth” an enclosure and spurge laurel, which may be the wrong plant, but Daphne is a suggestive name
nonetheless, a stuffed cavity: “strange animals appear” then whirring clouds   

and a housefly comes to eat my shit
and to eat my stomach and to eat me all over

I hear Franco Battiato
in her chewing and flying

I can watch her work me into the Chicago river
they will never find me there and never find my gold molar there

I grow into “a hot afternoon, a foamy wave or a scent of lilac,” a thing that sleeps in your long dark hair, a twilit head at the edge of a field, a head in a round attic window, a sea snail, a boy who heaves under a mound of turquoise beads;

“There is the time of the speaking body and the time of writing . . .”; there is the nurse who says that I have a bladder infection; there is the phone call two days later telling me I don’t have an infection and there is my penis still hurts—it’s one process; there is the flight from history into an uneconomic memory, aestheticizing wood smoke and a brown glove and a blue hand and a clearing that was over the road and also thirty-five years ago and just as it is now, in the sky and light making me expel my insides like a flower does or a gentle sea-thing that’s doing its soft fucking or soft eating like the gray midday light bewitching the clearing and the shed full of tools, the windows of which were installed sometime in the first decades of the twentieth century, beehives,

but fogged glass frames the vines and leaves

a nail head &
morning glories: pearly gates and heavenly blue

I see them in turned-purple and turned-red blackberry bushes full of moths
that I have just recalled while swallowing a capsule
an extra cube of space

another full room: a snail’s motherly folds

∩

Philip Sorenson is the author of three full-length collections: Of Embodies (Rescue Press, 2012), Solar Trauma (Rescue Press, 2018), and Work Is Hard Vore (Schism Neuronics, 2020). He lives and teaches in Chicago.