The Milliondream Night
Asleep at the edge of winter,
frostbitten mornings to greet
but
still the mind hand in hand with the sublime
pictures reeling through the night,
waking to the poignant and piercing aftermath
of these dreams, over and over,
an endless night dipping into phantasmagoria;
time unticking, and these feelings,
these mindmovies replay themselves in my head,
a movie theatre of the critical
and absurd.
Husk House
The orchard winds cried out
and I knew it was time to tend the trees.
Utter and splashing, my approach was off,
a bit smaller than a low gait,
a bit larger than a fearful crawl.
The trees rang their sappy bells
and their water-shaved roots showed their belly
to the sky in a flash of transient womb.
Empires shuddered, cupboards closed, wood-wrought cabins crumbled,
watching the winding graze of fruit envelop
the shrouds of the ubiquity of the surrounding society.
Their locust skins fell only half-dead
into my jar; the pupils dominated
and the day was an eyeless country blue.
A distant storm could be seen
feeding on the houses and trees wired to the ground,
ripping them up like a picked berry.
A harvest of sorts—the giving of shingles and plums and worms;
their ovaries goldened and fell,
keeping pace with the rain
until an inevitable pool formed,
as did memories of broken levees;
yet it was not flood. “This is a long drink,
a pure solution to dilate our seeds;
we ream life from these swarms of necessary rain,”
they sang. And so it was in the glory of day
when I saw them smile, then realizing
that they truly cradled the particles
needed to wash ashore the continuous onslaught.
Mouthful of Pills
The house made out of rat teeth gets cavities from the sugary wind
you suppose and then step into the supposition
the translucent jellyfish are micro Universes
brimming with supernovas
arms are amputated in the surgery wind
no more little toes for the Aborigines
the screaming clouds knock out the sun
the screaming clouds throw hail onto the Earth
the screaming clouds lessen the elbow room.
Heath Brougher is the poetry editor of Five 2 One Magazine. He has published two pamphlets with Green Panda Press and his first chapbook A Curmudgeon Is Born is forthcoming from Yellow Chair Press. His work has appeared or is due to appear in Diverse Voices Quarterly, Chiron Review, Of/with, Main Street Rag, Crack the Spine, *82 Review, Mobius, BlazeVOX, Third Wednesday, Otoliths, eFiction India, and elsewhere.
