Artwork: A Rustle of Dry Sticks by Will Jacques

Filmy Derive iii: It
Sean Moreland

on TV one night
tucked in a gutter the next
at first I bet it floated, too

an amphibious tattle
told on small towns

from outer space

a dead brother's
vegetated face

the menstrual skin
of the milk in
your wheaties. a laugh
that is the low fart

of a smashed mouth.
a kiss that is the terminal
cutting of the forget-me
knot heart

of a mud dog
in a dead puddle
with bike tracks

on its belly. Inside
the sewers a little girl's
flesh has left smatty socks
and gingham behind in a brush

with bare pubescence, stirring
the soft boy-sticks of her beloved
losers in the teeth of a spider
that shits out the butt ends
of smoked planets
a thousand wet camels

their cotton rotten
with shithouse rats

amidst the condoms and cock
roaches in distant new york

where this broken copy of the book
this piece of delirium's Derry
is buried with the newsprint, It's

cover gone, taken maybe by rats
for nests below the metro

where ripped paper stalks
the sluice and chittering emptiness

of a best-selling fear-machine
haucked up by a car-wash
from the nauseous swell

of my memory where this
wax turtle gathered bodies
in the must basement of my

boybrane, mindseye still fixed
by a maw like a greasepaint
anus rife with yellow fangs

inside the round balloon
– face of an octopedophiliac
clown: our alligator heart

does a punch-dummy dance,
has a shiny buttonnose, blows
a pennywhistle, is airless and spiny
inside its grin, grimy wise when it

calls to the ghosts: gone children
dressed in rags of the rock
–was-fresh-then fifties, seen

through the day-drunk fugue
of the opening eighties, dragging
the reader's attention roughly

to the suppurating miracle
It's gigantic vacuity is, this
myth of america

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Whiled pterodactyls
Sean Moreland

wind-kissed

why notice
           ice whined

we make much
of eyes

o pen
where is

our other
wise while
we pose

before the mirror
moves the mom/ent

or what we
mistake for it

in under
words

worn as white
bones

there is a kind

fossil where
flying was

pteros, and dactyl darkened sky

closest
lost continent

this closet

where little fingers

cruised infinite cerulean
and star-gored velvet swathes

a fall struck
whack of wings
pan we made
of wire hangers
waxed paper

and the high
wide night
was ours

til the scream of coming
sun

brought us down
and we hung

stale rags from
bent wing-bones

a suspension
                   bridge

                   to
                   nah
nah nah
                  gnaw
          ‘nyah

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