This is a section of a long poem called Above the Fold. Another section of it has been published as a chapbook called the Viral Lease from Small Anchor Press. The poem is about the process of watching things happen in your name both across the globe & in front of you, & the ingestion of media images that represent the state of the world & its publicities & privacies of pain. People do awful things to one another & then other people say “aren’t those awful things awful” & then there is also kissing.

Long Live the Riot Squad



Architecture of ghosts:
jungle-gyms
& parking lots.

I am space
between the frame.

We laugh at the frogs
& the senses.

All five senses
are involved in looking
at a building:

a house is
a skein as yarn
is tortured
by strings,

croaking lungs
of phlegm
& marble.

Ringing phones
in the mouths
of newborns.

There is a map
of America
in your mouth.

It is divided into 32 teeth.

America is a bite-shaped hole
so big that it reflects itself
into dominoes, bumpercars.

An invisible hand
buries you with teeth.

Write your final list
of words

that do not define.

A mouth of snow
wires tendons

across the park
of rings.

Cured olives
gravel scabs.

Two red motorcycles
rest in the ditch,

front wheels
still spinning.

Your pupils contract
a pencil lead like

oil on the frozen river.
Lick the 9-volt battery

into a French horn
that churns snow
into granulated sugar
as fir trees curtsey

a tattered plastic bag.

Once more, the veins show
beneath your eyelids,

the white paper
folds easily

into an envelope.
Rust in the maproom.

Rust in the elms.

Long live the riot squad.
Long live the broken

windows. Every blink
ricochets iron piping.

Every blink elicits
a new bomb.

We are chlorine, frozen
fingers gone black
for the dog’s eyes.
The mayor’s pliers.

White soap scum
colluding the riverbank.

The newspaper
burns beside
the two-lane highway:
a box of staples
beside the box
of dried dandelion heads.

A grain mill
rises over the hill,
an abandoned church
filled with snowglobes
of churches.

Write the ditches & horses.
The walls of night
& surgery. The brushfire
whispers
the museum home.

A cracked window
of tombstones.
A hundred names
carved into the door
of the rest stop.
A hundred beetles
crushing under foot.

Teacher warned me
not to open
the jar of flies.

Cleats
rip the grass.

My task
braids the spines
of the mice
into clothing.

I have returned
a ribcage
in my arms,
flies buzz
my sweating head
of oak.

To kiss
the cracked ceramics
of your lists.

Teacher begged me
not to chew
the chalk.

Teacher taught me
how to pay
the ticket
with blood,

to cleat
dewberries to the owls,

the birch trees
at dusk.

A fox head
of tin
on the grey
metal desk,

six students
circle
the stain
in the cement.

That’s how a fish feels
when it has to breathe
the air.

He opens the door
& the teacher
sees the handle.

X-ray
the creek
to find the wings.

Take the
training bra
to the dairy queen,
where egg whites
dry on the
cow’s skull.

Drinking a warm beer
at the oil well,

you remove
your quake,
make a promise
& dive
into the deep end.

A swan dive,
a realgood dive,
upended by all the erased emails.

No,
said the wind.

We are near,
said the wind.

Name your grief
like a bar of soap.
Sign your grief
on the dotted line
of the subpoena.

Claw your school
like a gift
in unrippable
paper.

Bate me
with the sound
of your skin
against other skin,
said the wind.

We are near
the school
where the names
swan into wind,
said the wind.

We are near
the crater,
the buckets
of mold
& meat.

We will be watered,
be the dull gleam
of war
in the morning news.

We will hold
the subpeonas
over our heads
like clouds
& they will water
our cracked skin.

Leer into
the wind.
Go nearer,
to the skin
the wind stretches
across the school’s
gaped mouth.

O Ruby, the school spits
bodies out like
frozen snails.
That they
ball bearing.
That they
icicle.

Eventually we all
become poached yolks

holding up the jersey
of our favorite

sports team
& the redhead

standing beside each of us
will be the same redhead,

his hair of copper,
his hair of writhing.

Wedged a vow
to strangle the dinner speech.

The garish light
of a cello string
wound round the thumb.

The guilt of night gains
a gesture of hellos,

walled under the vow.
The arrival is an infant,

irked & bent:
the state of volume lunging.

The branded atom
prizes a sugar beet.

It was a weird war,
the wolves glutted,
on hammers.

All winged,
all more.