James Wagner
Latoil
The normal pain of weddings or weedings or
Plus. A man is a box out loud. A man drains
A dangerous coal. There are dignified hides
Of curative–spelled green–in which the vats
Of practice spoil the ozone. If you are deaf,
Don’t bobble the coins that far from the soda.
A gallon of failure. A man is an oat on which
Not one fly garage attempts wonder. Not a
Grave, but a very foldable maxim. Attempt
To see the shaky litter of comportment while
Aligned with snow and cursing. Cursing sounds
So mild. A man is a few dented sheep boxed
In a man is walking and talking about traffic.
Palu
Mustard volume the size of values, watery, doltish
Afternoons. Promise me no more holes in there.
Or they will come down the hall. In boots and long
Abated anger. Where for the belt. Tip-tip, a bag
Of snow. She said her feelings felt too big for the
Room. Running through and divots. Mesmerism
Of affable people. Yet the moon hits them full: cold
On the shoulders. I remember…and immediately
It is a version. A version to house the paint with.
It was never enough to follow the points of the ruler.
A kind of what was it murder is so newspapery. One
Did show him the blue eyes of the piano handler, the
Talk of love in the offices, the boredom of reflecting.
Dalit
for Bei Dao
Aperture, design, frame, precept, ion. Amble
In every grade, per the house wine, as is lisped.
Most of the wagon tossed the ore from books.
I or that equation pixilated, thought-taped, is
A fig meant for those shoals that have cats? It
Goes on, the deaf closed moon, arranging a twin
Secret, that irrupts a sheet’s queendom. I felt
Something erase itself, eel off. A no. A question
Affixed to a word’s birth, the causal shell wind-
Aided, alarmed into was. O.K. As they dream,
With fingers in many places. Earth even a death.
The fire quaking like a telling. Into buildings that
Vanish in waves. Where to. Grovel, lovingly.
James Wagner’s poetry collection, the false sun recordings, will be published by 3rd bed this August. Recent work of his has appeared in Aught, Castagraf, Denver Quarterly, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He teaches an online poetry workshop for Syracuse University.