When I said I like you this way:

- acrobat
- architect
- motion

I meant autoerotic, sunday afternoon, 
heat. I  meant orbital, clenched fists, 
our concrete apartment /
accidents & bruised tongue

When I said I like you this way 
I meant milk lapped, 
you begging for what I couldn't,
vulpine & submissive in the only way.
I meant commitment
I meant strawberry red, accented, 

vital

What are we waiting for?


​

I once sat in
parking lots
with boys in
torn collars.
One had red hair,
he gave me sips
of schnapps
I was fourteen
and crowded with
the sparkling
abundance of
treasure.

I pretended to
like camel cigarettes
the sound of
smoke in
my throat was
a giveaway
to how young
I didn’t want to be.


​

A.M. O’ Malley lives in Portland, OR where she is the Executive Director of the Independent Publishing Resource Center. Her writing has appeared in Nailed Magazine, Poor Claudia, and The Burnside Review, among other publications. Expecting Something Else is her first full-length book of poems and came out this spring on University of Hell Press. Follow A.M. O’Malley at amomalley.com.

Untitled
 
A banjo player,
sitting on his stoop,
finds a little piece
of banjo string
in his heel.
He is handed tweezers,
which he uses to tug the string out.
He bleeds.


​

I look at blackbirds     thirteen more     ways
    
          after wallace stevens

I.
a tied knot , a black coruscation ;

II.
what appears , and now fades , in the agitated
snow-bound soil ;

III.
as contact and re-contact and lifting 
away into hard blue eggshell blue as 
blue after biting ;

IV.
eyes , a dead rabbit's eyes in a butcher's 
shop window ;

V.
two sudden emanations – the woman looks up from her phone , and tatwig street is on fire
its violence immaculate

VI.
without inflection , the dutiful sudden
candour of rainfall ;

VII.
smouldering snow-bound driveways , if considering blackbird we are far
without patience ;

VIII.
forgetting , punching an
incorrect number ;

IX.
the aeration of beats of her wings
on a window 

X.
five or seventeen or twelve swooping black bodies

XI.
sunlight is faded, articulate flutter ;

XII.
its instruments fade like a portion of night ;

XIII.
my phone screen blurs at the scent of his body – my phone screen blurs at the scent of his arms







NIGHT AUTO

    I.
I kept my hands on the dashboard. I kept my hands 
down as the snow made the journey
blind and buried our treads in the night's butter
coloured tailback to a city 
filled with art galleries and  funeral homes
and funeral homes
which hung paintings on their walls 
of tuscan landscapes and spanish
pavilions . the coffins of our mothers weighed nothing
or weighed too much! the pale water
colours make death seem like a holiday, like
something you can return from.

    II.
in the time it took to sing, my hexameter 
broke like a biscuit or a vase. Its sound was in my clothes, a singing 
sheaf of grass ; a grown-ass man held my language down, putting 
his fingers in his mouth at a raised restaurant table. is this what it 
takes for an arm to hold the weight
of an entire generation? Is this 
how you spread a sticky pink web
and dragged it through
my rooms? in my closed car 
I like to think about things I've forgotten,
or guess those I'm about to forget.

    III.
now i've had time , it seems
he was teaching me, in his own way, how to box, or how
to string words along like a pike in the channel ,
gauging its keenness for death with how hard
it pulls on the chord , or how limply
it writhes in the bucket , flashing
like a pocket of change ; it flashed 
in the sun! i pulled my knife out.
I made all the things I rely on
gold, and turned them around on my driveway
and drove them over into gold dust
and spread this on my soil.

    IV.
yeah - the mind can echo for a good long 
while after you say her name - 'p' ,
yes - the mind is a fine tuned 
instrument capable of returning to its 
roots from tasting how the air
works , and seeing the work
of your forebears in the careful
golden fretwork of the gentle white building 
which sits on that humber lawn like a beetle's 
broach in the sun and she keeps on coming and
going in her bright
yellow dress – yes her name can 
echo for a good long time . yes i keep 
to my ear the ground – yes i'll keep my mouth
to the night. 







After Francis Bacon's 'Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion', 1944

    I.
    the air is a sexual organ – it carries disease , dishevels
    with its fluke the dry grass around gethsemane where
    now there is a fuel station, a triad of white flats , washing
    pitched into the sun ; the shoulder blade is too a fluke ,
    my bent red intestine – purposing is why I remain, gathered
    into segmentations , or else prized out from march , its
    worrisome air ; I will wait until my name is called, gently .
    This is the certitude I have.

    II.
    rainbow bird spotting – do you admire the curve of her wing,
    its drooling mouth , its horrendous eyes ? in pyrimidines
    I call out to my father , say , what is this body in the air, dropping
    like a knife into the world's skin ? he answers, but neither is
    this more clear . the world shudders , as if space has thrown back
    one of its own, and he was a tide which sung , and startled
    the hemisphere . red black , red black , red black .

    III.
    a mouth open as far as a mouth can open ; surely this is night , 
    the clock tower of its furthest point, like a scratch made intolerable
    on the dutiful skin . brushwork is a container, but you get 
    a certain love from sweeping the tiles, your black coat, the dog's
    hair, the sky's throat . you have to press your ear up very close
    to hear the scream that caves make, that any gap or breach 
    in the world makes – just because it's     open – just because you need to .







thirty one

    I love the city ; its pulverising grey of upturned tree 
    roots, its metastasising genres of blank plastic , its plants
    like obsidian or fragile glass wafers . I gently reveal myself to 
    its
    calamity – I gently stand in the brick arches beneath holloway
    my hand clasping a bland pool , an accidental
    fallen flower , deciding how to comport myself , how to wear 
    black outside of funerals .







( the white sea-baltic canal poem )

    [ a ]
    an empty curse ; with soiled white
    hands held – in prison's
    river , forgotten to everything ; even
    our anticipate mothers , their remembrance

    on the first morning when our sentry
    called into the blankness , said the blind fields 
    were a bounty
    to the knowing – such a man mistook the clouds themselves
    for bewitched upside-down boats , their pale oars
    stroking the nether sea 
    like cigarette smoke – the wind a smoker's breath , 
    our hardness -

    [ b ]
    you want to believe good news , or 
    kill it 
    very early , before 
    it sprouts leaves or disperses seed
    in the minds of a population who have abandoned
    wellness - 

    [ c ]
    a bird wheels
    above the mud pack
    river - 

    I bend my head to see it ; 
    my neck cranes
    sideways - 

    [ d ]
    sorrento leans into the sea -
    the peach white sun leans into the sea - 
    your cough stifles the sea - 
    your dead friend , gumilev , is a name in bronze -
    they shot him in october , or at the end of september 
    ; sorrento is a wilted forest - 
    ; her squares are sun touched , unlike 
    the catacombs of lyubyanka, the farmyard smell
    that death has

    [ e ]
    the stairs of povenets
    ascend to death , to subtle waters
    in the land's mouth -
    they do not deter me . i am so, so patient.
    will I see you there?


​

Owen Vince is a poet who writes about architecture and video games. Poetry editor for HARK, he also runs PYRAMID Editions poetry press and tweets @abrightfar.