3 poems
History, Of a Poetry
The eye pleases on the ocean,
Apparition
Spalls stars, appall,
Appellation,
Transom,
Substand,
Permanence
Comes, coarseness over exsanguination,
Type and fee, landphoon,
Without referent
Inscribed
With what letters
(
Incise
Abolition
)
Whatever
Is like this,
A presume of I
Prison types out,
Plenary letters
Orchard ashore,
Fetters pen:
How long
Would you undo the skeins, for whom
A wave ablates, a letter opens.
Oblique
Shells cease suicide by the sheer score,
In brosse with water power and beauty,
Tryworks aubaded manqué tongues ad nauseam.
Home truth on the rack, injury a ration,
Kingfisher on backs. What may aver over above
Eternal life, self-command, advects out.
Where three cigars ducked out, lay glot.
Potomac rings rosin; bridge, anamnesis;
Want is that ditch music on every piece
Of intersectional road. A blood cradler.
Transmute that, epergne. Civil religion
Trammels, furnishes, pistles, memorial, a Janey
You perfuse ad nauseam. Each bidding blankets
Sensation, puts flowers in cheek, death
In cheek, patients speak, Hotchkiss or Howitzer.
Symptoms manifest grace passim place.
The Gods of Repositories
We ask who is
Missing several ways.
Did hair-shirts
Interdict hair,
Did scruples screw
In a face.
The blood parts snared
Pedestals
Voice over. Stone walls
Wash wish white
Music for Black people.
Rhetorical figure
Knaves are, nails unlike
With life.
Parts
Sun,
Starves tasted
Piss outlived
Hell now and again,
Billfolds lowed
In grass woke to a shirt
Mid-babble
With night feelers.
Throw good
Soldiers after bad
Wake to the
Night surgeon, etc.
Throw maggots,
Lay hearts. Skin on
Skin parts.
Doctrines on billfolds.
Means on battlefields.
Matthew Moore’s poems appear in and are forthcoming from journals and magazines including Fence, Interim, Kenyon Review Online, Lana Turner, and Second Stutter. With Logan Fry and Caroline Gormley, he is co-editor of the online poetry journal, Flag + Void. His first manuscript, The Reckoning of Jeanne d’Antietam, was a finalist for Interim‘s inaugural Test Site Poetry Series.