Kristi Maxwell

Cui-ui

a beautiful outlaw
 
Today, the holster hosts no weapon, not even a fang.
 
A feast of snow feeds a lake, pesters a lonely plate.
 
How does a hologram dream? A so-so lord battles
 
a hologram’s blooper: a ghost             whose feelers
 
feel of frozen stone. Drool grows to flood. Not a handsome wet.
 
*
 
Forget blood’s fleet. Forget bloom’s flop. A woman leaks. Forget grass
 
as green’s poster-kid. One fawns over a doe. One yawns and a yodel
 
emerges. Address a meadow as land’s slow jam. Groove. A beastly storm
 
hardly stops a bone. Fog as a plaster on the broken sky. Hope softens.
 
A flagrant web of hope passes as home, morphs to table. We’re the meal.

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Chinchilla

a beautiful outlaw
 
error’s robot wrote body body body
week to week              week or two of
better yogurt: pure fuss, gourmet sorrow
woke to ‘best of’ of sex         
yet       bored oyster    but
deeper fork worked
burst purse
guess   muumuu or murmur
suds grope form
soft dowry of regret
geese perk up sky
joy stems from bye
youth’s porous detour             droop-troupe
dumb fumes
our seer borrows dust from dry streets
moved by go’s story, our seer, too, goes
poster of empty eggs
poser vortex demoted to storm-sour gust
ego-stuffed motor ordered to zoom
red red ruses

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June Sucker

a beautiful outlaw

a giddy widow hid a foal: a hoax-family
to fool—fill—a “why?”

a filly to add glad to a bald day
mad at a limit—ova afloat: blimp? boat?

a tomb told off by whom?

a TV told of a wall, a gloat

a body bid that a moat halt
what might dim—to loot god
of doom—a moot gig—a limo
with a flat—a lamp lit at midday
​

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Kristi Maxwell is the author of six books of poems, including Bright and Hurtless (Ahsahta Press, 2018), PLAN/K (Horse Less, 2015), and That Our Eyes Be Rigged (Saturnalia Books, 2014). Her poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Bennington Review, Boston Review, and jubilat, among elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville.