Noah Burton

Between two people there is always a theremin

Don’t eat your crib. A puffed up
toad rib-bits outside the pine shed.
And when you hold a quartz up,
one hand painted in the prism light,
that’s about the end of it all; the bed
and the high beams—we are talking
over baby monitors on how simple our
chores are today when the police
knock and say, Sir, Madam, we’re having
a di cult moment, it’s going out of hand,
needs to be punished. What moment,
we ask? The cop taking off his billy hat,
shakes out the dandruff . I don’t know,
he says, and falls back into the lawn
under the sprinkler glossed with the refracting sun
like a blue squid threading in a bathtub.

---

Foul

I’m not drafted on snow as you are in water
and when we look at the barn
a goat falls out of the door.
Somehow this always happens:
a goat falls out of the door.
He must have been thinking,
he must be be thinking, he must
have thought, there was a tall
rock, there is a tall rock,
there will be a tall rock,
he can, could, would, jump on.
As you said, this always happens.
Or was I saying it? We lean over
scratching our head together.



--
Noah Burton was born in Kansas, grew up in Virginia, and now lives in New Hampshire. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of New Hampshire. Most days, he works at a bakery over the border in Maine, teaches at New England College and the University of New Hampshire, and plays in the band, House of 1000 Sports Cars. Noah’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Outlook Springs, Cruel Garters, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, gobbet, among others, and he is a recipient of the 2015 Dick Shea Memorial Prize in Poetry judged by Tanya Larkin.