Joe Emanuel

Jazz Bird

Open sky is a sparrow’s prison.

Like a fat horse, a vapor bounds the Earth,

we are Her suicide. You,

such as you are,

buoyed on into the buttery clouds,

see it all black and backlit from

underneath.

You as I imagine you. You

turning bird, hatched under rain-heavy eaves

practice broaching your clouds,

in its throated cloak, boding:

beads of ice

round crowded phone wires,

trees bow low, a hushed nuptials.

Who is availed of race?

Of beauty,

all yonder in heaven? A horse, I said,

who dreams of the music of windy grain,

who summons God in the soil

and dreams Her akin bounds the Earth.

A bowl of flour and sunflower

seed and ocean of milk, left uncleaned,

makes in a yolk dusk a thickness;

a blank matter,

of firmament or song, a song

the tongue lays upon one’s ear:

Spring coming! or another ruse

to carry of a log from a long-lived elm,

perturb the algae,

and carve a nest in it.

Who is availed of open eyes?

The horse slows, the Earth is quiet

and I will wake with sleep in the corner of an eye

when the night guard throws open

the curtains at 9am.

Lastly, when the bells sound,

your hair is hay is satin

is fine and the smoke machine breathes

a ruby dust. I overslept.

Petroleum Jelly

Coalescing, the soft heat

smells of cooked berries and butter

and roast chicken.

It hangs on the cabinet doors,

the humid ceiling and spent towels.

Tree leaves turn violet and gray,

every note a consequence.

Afternoon’s remnant

insists on me my mother—

foists my brother, hush and un-breathing

upon me. His memory

is smitten, tied with chicken wire

to stove and kitchen counters,

the water pot and vinegar syrup,

hemmed in by a business of flies, binders of bills, ferns

and birds of paradise in clay pots.

A stimulus of words over coffee,

planting and re-planting

a strip of fly paper peppered with wings,

segmented from bodies

from wings.

There is an odor

water stains in new concrete.

I tracked it in on my rainboots through

the mudroom, noxious and lasting

as an open bottle of motor oil.

And a red flower like a cornucopia

and salty tears

and a mariner’s horn

painted in red berry and a pin’s head of blood.