Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Upholsterers' Moon (part 1)
a brief history of
rain
collects on
what the eye brings
down what animals
sleep under
buzz-snap-buzzing
in the vacancy sign
horseshoe-shaped
meadow's bog
a bed as a rampart
no more
rained-up unburied travelers
cutting down night
with their shoes
& socks & stockings & noise
stockyard & upholsterers' moon
waxy windows eave
crows a button
to button up
lightning stuck
in the pond
to throw a bit of dark all over us
& you know
where to find
dust
here in the signature made
small spilled into shadow
no telling the corollary of an affair
so then the moon
drifting way too
close gets leaky
going through treeline when
a voice in the radio accidentally
says your name
how lying
might ferry us through several parts
of the month
a little
blood on the underside
of a toilet seat
we go dark
into the fellow's letter this kitchen
window is saying
something so we should learn
to listen with the palms of our hands
fish pulled into the drinking water
sucked into our sinks a glass of it
I talk too long on the message
machine I forget what I really
wanted to say
Max Roach is dead goodbye Max
Roach go softly into the ground or
earth
a dog is stranded on a raft in
flood muck true
its parents long dead
true
swallows gather up in the air again like
a bushel to pull the cartoon curtains shut
true
nothing against
us standing out here
waiting with Declan & cigarettes for any bus
we
make our cupped lanterns
& into traffic while it's
still wet
caging us off
crooked Dublin we're
sleeping more
here less
there the staircase has its
avuncular knowledge
the librarian is
so lovely I start tripping & coughing
a diner of cudgeled-up phantoms
night asks for its devils back
yellow
about the eyes old sea
goes frothing forth
an opening in the floor of the room a
book in his lap
no school in the floods flood's
in the school &
hung pumpkins from the basement
ceiling
you know this game do you
Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of four books, most recently The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (Tupelo, 2009). He lives in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. He first read Armantrout's Necromance, Mullen's Muse & Drudge, and Blaser's Moth Poem on the front porch of 424 E. 1st Street in Tucson, Arizona.
