Apartment Poetry Quarterly

20A              20B              20C              20D              20E              20F

 

20A DAVID DODD LEE

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PLANT A MOONBEAM

This remarkable mole cricket’s body is covered in hair

It’s moving its eyes

There is face paint

And there are gears under the candles like a suspension (of pickerel)

The psychology of minnows

The air is about to absorb this biological sculpture

A nest like a wig

You could have heard a pin drop

I’m not good at meditation

Wild horses, with shining legs, lead to a chronology of meaning

A police car drifts slowly past the house going one hundred

A woman starts speaking and steps out of her robe

Then there’s the dust in the shadow, like the crease of a mail slot

The next thing I know I’m holding a mechanical pencil

It’s right here, I say, but the mapmaker remains unconvinced

Cattle, he says, are easier to work with

The smell of a lake in the summer, I say, as if the body’s denatured

A transference of heat

But I’m leaving out the living (breathing) moment

The way her lungs opened like a drawbridge

A black thread surrounded by blue light

The way the doorknob often turned on its own

The tip of a knife like a series of thoughts that require no effort

The blind wing passing over the egg in each buried bulb

Little triggers, hidden in the grass

 

 

 

 

THE INVENTION OF AGRICULTURE

Just hand me a maraschino cherry

The brightest of the five murdering nympho-chondriacs

Barefoot

And how he survived by drinking his own urine

Right there under Milk Thistle

These are a few of my favorite things

Swisher Sweets

Harry Nilsson at 3 a.m.

Wet Ones smuggled in via electric toothbrush

I know these days we think airplane, and for some maybe “the Wright brothers”

Checkerboard landscapes or a snowy coastline

A small bag of salted peanuts

The airplane allowed us to kill so many

We also began manufacturing pigs, a recent realization of mine

A sin

All manner of flesh rotting

Intestines bloating beside a wall

As the flange opens and shuts in my heart

Out comes the new merchandise

The beginning of a very long ending