X.

I drank to comatose my flesh and keep the knives possumed inside me –

(From high school through my twenties, I worked in mold-thrushed houses where a tenant’s coffin bloomed.

(In puddled screams of glass, our bodies stilled with finance.)

I lavaged out each burial, and soaked its corpse across the pavement.)

(A room emptied for renters)

(When dust describes the city as a tumulus of desert
And air hardens on buildings.)

(A separate floor of Marshalsea
Hosts our work release from Marshalsea)

I check my hands before the morning –
The kitchen floor’s not scabbed with footprints –
Confirm I didn’t stab my family in our sleep.

X.

Dress crinolined with property rights
Spreading out to rain.

Corpsed more than its mistress, and the children he murdered in U-hauls.

X.

When my brain is churned to aspic will you treat me by my name?

X.

Grave-laced buds threaten to summer

The life still spurned inside me.

Static culls my memory

Of your blood not skinned between us.

Like a disarticulated apse

Unhearted of its god.

X.

“Cum’s acousmatic language pupating in my speech.

Desire locked away and bleeding vomit.

Afraid I’d greet the emptiness by sieving into dust –

Left to trace the remanence of my mother’s womb.”

X.

He moved away from Oregon.
Worked IT in Los Angeles.
Drove arborescent freeways
Stitched around the city
Like a dehiscent wound.

(Modules of isolation – Commutation – Bond-ligatured monera
Compulsory suffering – Police funding – Corporate lebensraum
Cantonized suburbs – Where – Cops offload their stolen payments)

X.

Modules of isolation
Ligatured

X.

In
The moral ambiguity
Of dragging each stanza’s eczema
Further than this room –

To cuirass their grieving lungs with a voice nearly my own.

X.

Lips blink open post wintered silence, or from LaGuardia outgrowed the rain
And snail sewn mornings soured gray.

Neuropathy of close-up on a face bathed in hard water. To covered with the bay.

Hills catafalque cremated homes.

Moss bouquets line dusk.

I swallowed a neon apartment.
Blush
Anhidrotic brine
Grafted to my skin.

X.

Bombs scatter stars from night
Replace them with their flames.

X.

We gentrified the neighborhood
Placed aspirin in its grave –

Keeping our flowers fresh.

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Bryce Jones’ work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Surfaces.cx, Entropy, and numerous other publications.

*Image credit: David Lynch: Man Throwing Up, 1968.