Four Poems
For Sarah
Any soft place to rest your head a miracle.
Impatience is understandable, given
the lack of breaths remaining.
Sheepish & frantic, going from room to room,
but the house empty. Nowhere
to sit inside. Or out.
Outside the future furniture awaits,
like us hoping the forces
contorting us thru the days
are benevolent. Unlike sheep,
we’re untrustable. Unable
to adjust our eyes to benevolence.
No furniture is miraculous. A glossary. But
from miracles, we’re able to rearrange.
For Bertram
To wake up in tears is no way to wake up
& meet the day, already up & ready & hungry
for any meat that fills its plate. We serve
Ourselves into the day’s chomping feet first—
happy to be free of dreams extending
our terror into rest & making unrestful
Any shut-eye we’re lucky to steal from waking,
from our head-sad body-anxious days,
strung together like an infinite string of xmas
Lights, pulling together every terrible holiday
we’ve ever survived into the future, waiting
w/ a mouth filled w/ bloody mornings—
To wake up in tears to a day as sick as every other day,
tears tasting like nickels. A tear in our dreaming.
For Ford (Heist Movie)
Transition not a comfort, no choice but
To continue. Leave on your hands
If you must. Transmissions incoming
Always—the trick is listening to them &
Letting them listen to you. It’s a band—
A collection of bandits transitioning from
Breach to score to getaway to anonymity.
No one should know what you’re doing,
Especially you. No surprise for the writer,
No soup & no ladle. A bowl to swirl tears.
Transition from hunger to satisfaction &
See what else improves for every animal
You know. For the ones you don’t, who are
More important & who won’t snitch on you.
For Benjamin (Take Me To Feel)
Nine tiny red blooms candle the empty
Room into a particular set of atmospheric
Conditions where the beat licks off the
Magnets & forms shapes in the air a dance
B/t tables the air turning bends & folds
Like it’s feeling. Sensitive as a loose speaker
Wire & alive as much as any dust once was,
Before being shed. We were once alive,
Before being shed by friends & strangers.
Forgetting how to talk. Forgetting the beat
& how to be kept. A feral electricity. I feel
More social in spirit than I remember being.
I don’t remember being. My hands remember
Red & warm by candle & shot & pressure drop.
∩
Ryan Collins is the author of A New American Field Guide & Song Book and several chapbooks. Recently he was a finalist in the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press Chapbook Contest and the Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. His work has appeared in Apartment, The Biscuit Hill, Ninth Letter, Past Ten, Sink Review, swamp pink, and many other places. He hosts the SPECTRA Reading Series in Rock Island, IL, where he lives.