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FIVE POEMS by ADRIAN SOBOL

HIGH IMPACT DONKEY


You purchase a high impact donkey. You’ve never felt safer. You go downhill faster than your race car driving father ever dreamed. The laws of thermodynamics bend to your high impact donkey. At such high speeds, you witness the interstitial music woven between all living things. But you take a turn too fast. You survive. The high impact donkey does, too. You crash through a bakery window and end up covered in yeast, in flour, a trail of broken eggs behind you. The local children laugh. They tease you. They begin to call you Doughboy Dan in their little playground songs, even though your Christian name, the one your father died giving you, is Hot Dog Hank.

 

ONCE THE DREAD BOILED OVER, IT GOT INTO EVERYTHING


our daydreams left us

a forestry of graves


we were hands

knees


scrubbing the kitchen

crevicing the toothbrush


between tiles

What a mess, I said, my arm


stuck to the counter

I’ll have to amputate


pink, frothy, the dread ran down

the refrigerator door


it took beautifully

to cursive


leaving us messages

on the kitchen floor


melting ads, letters & old wedding

announcements to pulp


Happy New Year

Buy One Get One


All Expenses Paid

all these things we could not imagine


not even at the height of orgasm

which were (according to your day planner)


scheduled less frequently

pushed aside for regular intervals


of our deep orthopedic grief

it's been months since


I've longed this hard

to take out the trash


so what else can we do but strive

to panic comfortably?


the super hasn’t responded

to our notices


he hasn’t fixed

the leaking faucet


he hasn’t fixed

the rundown bestiary


I suspect he must have gone

ghost or has been one


since the beginning of time—

I like to imagine him this way

his tool belt askew

& full of tulips


two eyeholes in a bedsheet wading out

from our ocean’s primordial salmagundi


leading those first vertebrates

(Georgiana, Li’l Kilmer, Sally, the rest...)


on a search for beauty

through a world


designed

to kill us


in so many intricate

& delightful ways

 

THE FLAT EARTH SOCIETY


1.

we have theorized new solutions

for dancing


on television

we talk


about the roundness

of food


we are against it


we talk about the longing

of the american oil heiress

we are against it, too


2.

a house becomes another metaphor

for what we put in it


furniture, mourning, the half-life

of beauty


the brain memorizes faces, names,

the geometry of columns


in doing this we invent

our own gravity—


the trash we accumulate

is a kind of romance


3.

after the commercial break:


poets keep writing, the news

anchor reports,


even though

the market


has asked them


politely


to stop

 

SUNFLOWER SEEDS

for Molly Brodak


I’m living on my own

hunger


built from

the last of my flesh


this is mine

I said


snatching

bread


from

my guests


drinking wine

from their glass


come hold me

awake


away from

all the myths


I’ve made

for myself


like a magpie

tied to the stalk


of a sunflower

turning in fits


to chase

the sun

 

SUMMER DIMS TO A CLOSE


the latest attractions have come

& gone: the great crocheted lake,

the bear that can sign

its name in beautiful cursive, the almost

visible woman

spectacle reigns & fades

our surprise

works its way through us

with a shot

(the gasp was

invented back in Toledo in 1902

as a way to empty the body

for something new

a safer alternative

than the earlier pistol

method)

there’s nothing so hot

as that we said looking

at a few photographs

of our haircuts &

tshirts

proof

we were once this

alive & this beautiful

& bracing

for this world to grow

more interesting (an event, I should mention, that has not come)

I have since built myself a flying machine

& will of course crash it

through my splendor

baby I’m sorry

I was bored

& no one was around to see

 

Adrian Sobol (he/him) is a Polish immigrant / musician / poet. He is the author of The Life of the Party is Harder to Find Until You're the Last One Around (Malarkey Books) and this is not where we parked. this is ohio. (Ghost City Press). He lives in Chicago. twitter: @yo_adrianididit; ig: @yoadrianididit.






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