a lake slithering behind an empty store says rising out of serene residue the field i first dropped acid in
an intricacy of pills molts after this chintzy wind stains the inside of your eyes an intricacy of pills
my isolation swarms through complacent screens
hot wet entrails of clairvoyant goats is sliding beneath you a rusting church chained shut
the pinched sky away where the lake ends waking a king in the broken alleys around this anxiety she projects plunges down dry woody stairs boarded-up department store windows
my isolation says rising out of serene residue
the echo slowly consumed with you says disenchantment is a prelude to quenching a knot of code
the sun’s dodge and burn on an empty playground says your spine tastes slipping down your throat after your blue cars are gone tossing empty pizza boxes into blackness a bitten blonde engrossed in her phone
this soaked moon says all her dead lovers linger in her throat
a thunder in the corners of the sky spilled across her marbles the collapsed trees in those vacant blocks
these loose signs says gorgeous things gas across streetlight pavement around the late flooded light of anxious houses escapes him and lingers patches of spiderwebs nested in hedges
the ways the dead affect the weather says ribbons of dogs barking
an alley choked with thick brush woke up trembling a passage of moonfrosted cars
their pale faces sending loving-kindness to all the abrupt noises with stalks of wind-brushed reeds enacting soma escapes him and lingers eager gray kitten
the dead and their erasures convolving slantwise in her hand
I’m in love with the elephants here because they fulfill gravity’s promise. It’s hilarious when you brush their trunks.
Kin-kissing is forbidden in this brash town; you have to stand straight with your arms at your sides.
I’m waiting for the moon to rise, standing shiverless like a salt sheath.
Suspended, his days hung before him like a full clothesline during a rainstorm.
Whenever I get frustrated, I spin around in circles. I wear a hole.
You can walk through walls all day long, and never feel like you’re properly in a room.
The screaming of the disco moon was a nice touch.
She says, I think in pictures and it’s hard for me to remember words. I fill all the ice cube trays at once.
Sunny afternoons pull a froth of talking taut around green lawns. I was eating yellow light, blue light, the frail rainbow’d bubbles of thought’s push. A dog somewhere else strobes across cracked streets.
Newly-wakened clouds entwining with soiled-sullen blossoming. You could be so with velocity my cold fingers shuffle pulse and a whorish fullness. Rubbed loose.
Oh, I sting my tongue cold with thrills: the velocity of my bones, the slick panoply of Carl Cox, a bitter turn in a pierced truth. I’ve always landed in my skin.
“Drama” is just a sound. Distant festivals diffuse across a wash of sunshine, birds, saxophone. The waves assault beaches, dragging garbled glazes to the bottom of the lake.
When you stagger into empty parking lots: this sky, cobalt-mauve, crawls over you.
Inattention resembles pauses between leaves. Streetlights aren’t hollow late May; they spill over with midges.
As you sprawl through squinted alleys, thought coughs and slurs.
The leaves of an evergreen veer like ribs bent into needles. Our shaggy gray cat, caught in the rain, involves carpet with burrs of water.
Witchcraft, on screen, real time.
My talisman and my fetishes sink in this humid cascade of crackling showers. They fall to earth with quaking.
Our sisters live silently along the fault.
Soft muffleheads; they don’t bite, don’t sting. When I stand naked in the smudged incandescence of a room lit only by monitor, they playfully tickle over my skin.
from Black River Ghosts
the echo slowly consumed with you
waking caked with crackling moods
after transparent songs drift down the rain-wrung streets
a passage of moonfrosted cars
the field i first dropped acid in
says strong winds bring back her fathers hands
during import of our parents’ flaws
after faintness attains translucency
the scented epinephrine
whirling down upon zen-peaked roofs
says this and says that
after amphetamine spells your blood
from Black River Ghosts
the field with the astonished moon
says the music the music
after faintness attains translucency
in abandoned department stores numbers corpse and peel
voices of the shattered parking lot
crushing through smoky grades of icy slush
after troubled silence
licks the waves leave you with
waking to a health that burns
moon weeping into the roll of black river
My face casts sanguine shadows on the ashes
enough of us soul our heads down into dabbles, dust
suddenly badly ached, barely scared
Lewis LaCook is a poet, musician, web artist and programmer who lives in Lorain, Ohio.
