Four-leaf clover (poem)

      Four-leaf clover   When she’s dead they’ll clothe her False to claim they’d known her In a room of duty saving hours of light Mothballs give a church scent Skirt-clad hips span bench lengths She slips indoors alive   Why is it not yet over? Holdouts dare suppose her Likelier than they […]

Clarify Me Anointer (poem)

      Clarify Me Anointer   clarified lay the becoming way the motorcycle ahead under a sudden crossroads billboard uplit in LED the driver recalled when they’d complained or reading that complaints existed a runner pants in his periphery a towel flapping from the shorts reads FUND ME distant from connecting arteries wanting to […]

Adverse Possession (poem)

    Adverse Possession     Dear cerebral cortex Hors de combat. When we received the news We were saddened and shocked There is not much in the literature One or two articles after long search Found describing therapies Not met with any great success If it won’t offend, or make you feel superstitious (For […]

King’s Rook (poem)

Posted by ractrose on 1 Mar 2023 in Art, Poems

      King’s Rook   “I’m married to a freak,” she tells him. She talks, and when she talks, her story entrains to a detail that couples to another And while she was only holding a parking space so Artsy could truck some canvasses down The traffic stalls them pulling free, and Rainy talks […]

Nutshell (poem)

Posted by ractrose on 6 Feb 2023 in Art, Poems

    Nutshell   You know a secret that would crack the nut Yet it’s no secret When the boredom ends when every floor has been swept clean And the doors The gaping holes Allowing other hands to touch the walls, eyes to stare through glass at passersby The doors Can now be closed   […]

Where Fashion Sits (poem)

Posted by ractrose on 11 Jan 2023 in Art, Poems

      Where Fashion Sits   Are you the larval worm in the larder Every feathered pillow has this unseen delver You feel yourself layered in tissue paper Your rat’s race a peristaltic ripple of waxy flesh Your crackling head a pin The glue has brittled in the way of yellowed cellophane The leather […]

Explication (poem)

Posted by ractrose on 4 Jan 2023 in Art, Poems

      Explication   Morbid feet on a ruminant’s road They are speaking likenesses of nervous rounding More than an anthropologist’s brush off An antelope’s roaming is found to be enough By epoch’s end we have all gone soft And taken to occupy our cushions gravely fanning a white layer of flesh Wise to […]

The patient (poem)

Posted by ractrose on 29 Dec 2022 in Art, Poems

      The patient   Through the prayers of her family the patient they believed this, they were happy the miracle was theirs and not another’s won her toss, but the trial ended, its second phase never entered over conventional treatments not improved And time short, none to risk   She knew all in […]

Forbidden Fruit (poem)

Posted by ractrose on 25 Dec 2022 in Art, Poems

      Forbidden Fruit   Reincarnate from a molting-pod, as you were a jacket folding into its own hood, a chrysalis peeling an old pied skin then ratchet ratchet like a whalebone corset Worked up from the foot, past the hips Hung by the nervy grip of the brainstem Here you have crown and […]

Now Requesting Action (poem)

Posted by ractrose on 20 Dec 2022 in Art, Poems

      Now Requesting Action   All places unbelongers unbelong Equally are home, all household words Equal to expression of mundanity Unworldly this household is freeheld Like the angle of a cell constructs a shell Like a marriage of two fiefdoms must Superadd a garment to a crust The foot inside the boot sold […]