Apartment Poetry Quarterly

17A              17B              17C              17D              17E              17F

 

17b Adam Strauss

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THE DISCONTINUED OSSUARY AS ITS CONTENTS TURN INTO HUMUS

I have three beans, and two

Lentils. Only my sosie would

Know what to do.

But I don’t care what he does.

And if I would, the would-not will have stood

The test of time on

Two legs,

Like sugar and like

Sugar at its dregs.

My sosie—

Could simply be

My ecstasy,

With a man named Simon. I licked

His hand the way I would a frying pan.

My sosie and me,

Pouring out repose in a tree

Full of caterpillars and fucking.

Caterpillars like fists

Go knuckling,

Breathing their way to wings.

The tree has each man tricked,

The muscle-soul stitching ribs.

Ear at that tree,

I tapped my toes:

Excitement as it grows.

Each toe stirred

Like babies in cribs.

I love you the way

I like the blue-cress tress

Limns forelock and clocks,

Thence his cheek stings:

Afterimages of tears, and

Emeralds as they slip.

 

 

 

 

CADMIUM ECLIPSES BERYL

All the armaments

Leaked green verging red.

They lost their garments.

They lost their flesh

To mud and poisonous scraps:

Open casements from

Bodies past and furious.

If you give me a leap of bone

I’ll make it into a

Monotony of more than one tone.

With furious charge—

With, and with

The potency of myth, the Timothy

For which the grass its name.

We came, but said passage—

Nearly went down at the

Whorl they call

Zizima, which echoes which eructates

A modest fraud—

Small price

To pay for

Belief in a God.

Malted chop for Maltese

Toss entwines his spirits which he shies,

Which shyness he

Pursues like border collies.

He curbs a border’s follies.

He concocts a blue,

The afterimage of rock

Splits and the spill like mitosis—

Times its abed and ebbed, till green

Coasts exuberant greeting:

Rudeness but not the

Slightest brusqueness.

You are their guest; you are

Not a stranger in their home—

Which is—

Exactly—

The power of their home.

They are the

Warmest kind of cool.

You will never—

Catch either out as

The hapless, let alone

The fool with the cool blue drool;

Because with age

There comes renewal.

I talked myself to the

Point and purview duh—

Where we’ll learn a new cantata,

Where the gauge will only be for

The sea not any garden.

Nor any garden seems woods to me.

He, and he

Burns the wooden cage.

But maybe this—

Reduces the chance

Dust falls out from the fallout:

As France,

And as

France charges its account