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    Goad credo. Whether quaver or
    my larynx’s season
    of wilt.

    Our cleverness hard & unkind sinks
    into your parable, he said.
    I am disposed

    straightway,
    a continuous body resigned
    to outward travel as

    an artery arrayed
    in edgrow.

    *

    Shaken twice self-
    hooded, so
    soon

    the jewel’s smallest
    arm hung up in a dark space.

    Upright this irregular
    frontier a little dinghy thrown
    under the bay.

    *

    Lemon series. Dim-
    spent dispatch
    of pilots

    crimped to the merry ship.
    Refuted, by which

    I was impelled & afraid nonetheless.

    Having so long
    delayed.

    *

    Mr. Cocking did not fall out of the wicker but
    with the machine, the hole in the middle

    had it not
    collapsed his
    parachute of cloud.

    At length a theory a tarn of
    plunder stirring devotional crosshatch.

    a jam in wicker
    trussed oblong.

    Confinity exhausts the balloon
    itself, our dew in the valve’s ensuing
    number.

    *

    Preamble

    the place where time was rope or
    feeling mizened with yesterday’s

    implicit rain, how
    the slurry vertex

    hardened nobody nightly.

    Bulwark a gaunt sanity in
    chrysanthemum the
    instrument

    tripping downward,
    pooling—

    a self
    grown round.

    *

    His studded Byzantine
    scrivening

    the grime, sliding
    into each other.

    The architrave we,
    twice devoured.

    *

    This is what celadon
    deserves, this,

    the rumor of

    my favorite mother
    on the subway narrative
    dissolving—

    an amorous detour sent further astream.

    More sculptural.
    More hole.

    A pretext for one last meeting
    indefinitely frilled along.

    *

    It’s hard living down the tempers without improvising
    a grammar’s loose diplomacy
    of sleep.

    I was so inside the other sentence
    once emerged from
    the girding of

    the breaking
    up machine & miles of string.

    Somehow this clarifies
    my body’s axis within
    a pulp.

    Elaborately.

    Rotting where we crept
    back to the gouache.

    *

    Go back her.

    The victim detail, a seahorse keepsake
    sown with burrs in the wrong
    manner.

    Dreg song on the outside

    of its own
    hasty body on the outs as
    the script

    predicted.

    *

    Sooner run from the bargain we think to ourselves.

    Alloyed whereabouts
    unknown, pedant jetty jawing

    its image, templo-
    turrified in bloodhound
    chalk.

    *

    A brisk formalism eats the lakes
    out of iris. A bit dark.

    A little blue-scribbled battle

    with the conduit.

    The trouble wasn’t
    loneliness alone,
    my secret emergency

    mode enough coaxed back
    from the begging
    day.

    *

    Three red stars fossilize
    in the schoolyard a rhodo-
    dendron

    insomnia tinting
    the very sweet of pursuit.

    We have no brick nor
    garnish, daddy:

    how we
    address each other in
    the liquefying room in the worsening snow-
    globe’s incompliant
    worry.

    If timber’s easy kernel.

    The huntsman vexed was also
    stone defensively spoiling
    the root-meat.

    *

    I shall cede, I cede.

    The plague to the pippin,

    some scalding theft staining the bristle
    from the trough of a late
    morning
    tub.

    *

    The marrying whip-quote

    cut from
    your
    water-hedge:

    a school of realism descending
    one last time—koi
    koi

    & anniversary flint for smoothing over
    the deluge or whatever this mirror
    warning answering

    in fluke echo
    was.

    *

    Selling the cypress
    handles & privately, flabbergast,
    what we dangled
    over.

    *

    The absorption I’d always
    wanted. Sparingly.
    The coping

    of his noddled head.

    Trample lunge chant & forge
    owl cabbage

    where the door

    kept ajar, tussie
    mussie cosmos & easel
    dwindle.

    *

    Monoliths in the midst winter
    a spasm of fraying purpose.

    The swimmer in love swims
    under, removed from

    the pain
    scale for good
    behavior.

    *

    Afloat in permission, silver mar
    of sleep in its chain.

    A suspension of
    salts bored through cork.

    *

    Aisles of bronze in a wooden cloud & then

    a settlement

    of goldenrod spread far across these hills

    turns gray.

    Pestle thistle, a bruise in ormolu to soften lacquer.

    Shell lac still the split-light twig.

    *

    He seemed to be describing
    the very underpass.

    Our clinkered bird’s
    inharmonium.

    The dockyard’s roving prayer &
    knotted as a sailor’s
    child.

    *

    The yarrow & tansy of it all.

    Longer lawed the leaves
    of azure meander

    reciting burgundy
    burgundy maroon.

    To the miniature herd
    astonishment pulled furrowing
    from the well.

    *

    Should the last pressingness approach
    with its autocrine of downcast
    questions. Isinglass,

    ego in escrow—where
    my dune
    hollowed friend
    roughly

    speaking countersigned—just think on the lull. Pocketed, the four of them.
    Terribly, I loved them all.

     

    Michael D. Snediker is the author of two books of poems, The New York Editions (Fordham University Press, winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize) and The Apartment of Tragic Appliances (Punctum Books, Lambda finalist for Best Gay Poetry). He’s also the author of Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain & Queer Embodiment (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) and Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood & Other Felicitous Persuasions (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Poems from his most recent poetry manuscript (a finalist for both the Test Site Poetry Series and Tupelo Press’s open reading period) have appeared in venues including Action, Spectacle, Blazing Stadium, House Mountain Review, Interim, and Prelude. He is the recipient of multiple residencies at Yaddo and the James Merrill House and is Professor of American Literature and Poetics at the University of Houston.

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