by: Brandon Arthur
it was beginning in the attic. air gulped. but we forgot and pushed me out. smoke pulled into the ashtray. months ended it lifting dirt into walls. sparrows squatted into burnt out bulbs so scabs would harden and there’d be growth. wind circled houses pulling minerals from pores. thunder stopped and there was something green. veins. you poured water in. it erased itself from you. geese blank in the sky. the flood fell out of it. a black raft above. mud was mud again.
bits from the nest. no mountains. months spun into brown air. no warning scent. cells in the juncture thickening. you standing in the door. names fell off. it dried. leaves stained like speech. the sockets going bad. my finger twitching. they changed the curtains first but there was no more tape.
or the basement. from one corner. wind under the foundation stomping outside to the hollow of the elbow. centipedes surface from cracks behind a box on the floor. it could not house it all. paint cracked from heat. it leaked. small distant mounds had no grass. jars emptied. beyond window and thorns sand in a tractor tire and even if the taste of dirt no longer stings teeth we can never say it.
the liquid though split could find itself. hands. lumps under snow. put this under eventual leaves. wait until the moth hatches. bury. lift fingers. it bubbles into grass that is ants coming up. gum webbing against the pull. reaching through stings. nudging between. then skipped & repetitive. bones hit you.
Raised in the flatland of central Illinois, Brandon Arthur moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1999 and graduated from Colorado University at Boulder. He then received an M.F.A. in the Writing and Poetics Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute. His first book of poetry, expired Rx, is available through Monkey Puzzle Press. He currently resides in Denver, Colorado.
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