Daniel Poppick
Song
A ship is a neutral wand, friction
Denuded by spells of phosphor lotion
Theologian faces drool
Psalms in a column of gold between
Bucktoothed nimbi I floss like a sea
With fingers bone of clean & “ocean”
Pressing send on me
& the ship is unnatural, so my hair fills with fleas
& the chemical bath I dip me in tickles
& the Lord is inch by inch my friend
& a rat is a garden in concrete wind
& on the back of my eyeballs a dynamite prickles
As alphabets listen
& I bald & idiots glisten
Boy Racer
Fantails shed their silhouettes
Off a mythic hook
And crickets laugh like lawyers
Eating Mobius strips
Flint continues learning
Light frequent as its name
The roof beneath is forked
Charges through the hour
What if waves with windmill heads
Never asked for duels
The stories I have with being stung
With bees are already fuel
With the twang of the arrow
And snap of the bow
The Christian riding next to me
“His tears are truly frozen”
Talks of Mist and smells like hands
“Some of them instantly garbage”
Others slow and automatic
The woods maintain demand
A rim financed with apples
We never touched a thread
Shadow ironed with color
Their hearts beat quicker there
Rays a logical ransom
Parallel to crime
The driver listens while the hills
Loop from black to green
“I is not that scribbled face”
Says morning to a guy
“But coins I have to make
So pink slips caps-lock day”
Math continues paper crowns
Pulping in kerosene
And a white that amplifies
Running up its beams
Fred Astaire
One slips inside rain’s costume
And flails like a pharaoh for sound.
A hymn farts in the balcony
But no amen abounds.
When perception, vein of ants,
Swirls under sidewalks and a stray
Kitten lights upon your lap
You pass into a crack in class
That isn’t even there
Paint the stage with fleet harassing
Lights collecting rings
To form a face like a hinge
Upon which bliss can swing and creak.
What I feel remains discrete.
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Daniel Poppick’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in BOMB, jubilat, Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Claudius App, and elsewhere. A chapbook is forthcoming this fall from Petri Press. He lives and works in Iowa City, where he curates the Antibody Series and co-publishes the Catenary Press with Rob Schlegel