///

 it can take 700 years to WHEN PIGS FLY IN THE AYRE WITH THEIR TAYLES FORWARD
            to be pardoned
your murder may be solved
WHEN PIGS FLY IN THE AYRE WITH THEIR TAYLES FORWARD
and it won’t even be called a cold case
            thugs convene daily in public parks
loaded with technology of the era
            let’s weaponize _______!
i.e. infuse everything with the sweet smell
            of death-drive
it can be a rosebush
            a kiosk
it can be a nonprofit invisibly steering
your movement 

 
 

 ///
early morning half-dream :
I blew the dust (skulls) off of a book of desirable poems
in a box of desirable books
somewhere else a book
is waiting     I drove through the red dust
without knowing the time
past a group of women who marched toward the same sundown
            oh       it’s eternity
the problem eternally being                                                       
your laws
on my body

 

///
make space with buoyance
            you and your lover will always be swept into what people think
upthrust your word choice
            what they think you think based on their mishandling
hold the space for your lover      a babe in a lake     three bodies of water
part of the sky     (you are not Chicken Little)
you and your lover masquerade as mild people
and no one ever asks you what you think 
friends nor
creep-a-zoids

 
 

///
dream : a scene appeared on my forearm in the form of a sleeve
the ink asking for my visual intelligence
a green leafy limb     fueled by desire in the trunk
today I may qualify for Medicaid unable to predict
income for 2020   I talked to four people at one store
about the whereabouts of an electric kettle

 

///

it’s a seller’s market (suburban)
ancient aquifers are dropping
the diurnal freight train puts me in a less personal mood
             than the nocturnal train
but it’s all conveyance (commerce)
            sped up to tear up
human bodies    hex the owners
shriek one time
the words become something horned
            outside barricade

 (Sean Bonney in memoriam)

 
 

///

our details don’t matter
             that’s what they take
clearly I do things that are wrong
             a story is what I will never give anyone 
nonlinearity is my protection
a line of automated fire 
wrong place wrong time
don’t lady me

///

November got noisy with people
            the colder days
the dimmer light
             the citrus is ripe
two quarters of a squeezed lime
             lay in the dirt
an endless Sunday night
party 
men in white trucks (or that is the
             form in which they appear to me) speed
down the partition
as we spin (further) from the light

 
 

///

I’m going to live my life this way
  language arrives     attention to commonplace
can that energy age us
differently?    keep old souls youthful?   
you can look at yourself
more closely from a distance          
having left documents
to let go of former selves      and their demands     
still all I want
is for my friends        to read me 

///

gave me a start    thinking it was another
            mouse   it was
a dust bunny    A. ended another letter
            “where are you?”     busy
being a body     oh that’s    what are you
            doing?    I’m busy being a body here
busy as a dust bunny play bowing
            to things animated by wind 

 

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of six books, most recently, A Year From Today (2018). Her book, Famous Hermits, is forthcoming in 2021. She was the director of The Poetry Project from 2007-2018. Since then, Szymaszek was the Hugo Visiting Writer at the University of Montana-Missoula 2018-19, Poet-in-Resident at Brown University, Visiting Poet for the Fire Island Artist Residency, and the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry. She currently lives in Tucson and is working on a big book entitled DIVINE MIMESIS::PASOLINI POEMS.