UNLIMITED JAGERBOMBS
hell yeah it's the mardi gras it's time to fill our backpacks with
granola & liquor & shut off the human parts of our brains
shift into the version of ourselves that only knows how to
shriek for beads & puke in public shift into the version
of ourselves that cares deeply & truly for like 40 minutes at a time
the whole damn city a poem wrought from trombones
the poem fucked then unfucked by catelepsis the poem
shot straight through with cinnamon & celery to simmer
for hours like a roux your friends & my friends friending
each other towards ablution shoving their bad sticky faces
against the grim glitter of midnight to find the jagerbombs
with someone's mom jagerbombs percussing us into paralysis
unlimited jagerbombs blasting us through the sort of morning
where we walk down by the river & see the steamboats & shout
out hey steamboats where you going are you sad as we are
do you love love as much as we do & if you don't why not
UNLIMITED ASTRONOMIES
i am trying to learn how to run how to scrape myself against the world
this whole summer in exile this whole summer synthesizing seven
or eight different kinds of sorrow & blasting through each one
like a finish line these unlimited astronomies bulging with dysphasia
yr voice the ridges of a seashell & my voice the gullet of a mortar
the poem a machine built only for killing as if knowing
yrself makes you anything more than flesh & blood &
anodyne & does anything more than bring the racket of reality
into keening focus yr bones & my bones rectifying nothing
but the hiss as coals grow cool in grass i am
a scream vibrating in the space between stars & the forgiveness
accorded the dying & dead these potentials as certain as
thunder & twice as steep & for fuck sake they say for the
eternal sake of fuck may our prayers go unanswered may we write
as much we have nothing left to say out loud may we
sweat hard garbage & hold each other close & know the things
that happen in the night all full of vowels & leftover
lasagna how haloed in the sacred yellow light of the
refrigerator we raptured & ate the whole thing like a fist
UNLIMITED TEENAGE WEREWOLVES
we're trying our hardest to kiss ghosts we're waiting in the parking
lot like landmines at the bottom of a well someone says what gives
& we're like oh man what doesn't we're unfurling across thursday
nights with the grace of a smoker's cough we're genuinely sorry
we're stuffing the suburbs in the neck of a bottle of gasoline
then lobbing it into a quiznos we're in a band & it's terrible
we're bending at the waist in the gaze of the moon for its glow
to administer a scoliosis test to the twirl of our spines we totally
dunked yesterday when we howl it sounds like dropping a guitar off
an overpass into traffic we're getting hair in weird places & teeth
in even weirder ones puberty's meteor is hurtling through us when
we swing our bats at mailboxes slow flames burst in haloes
around our shitty cars we'll never forget how to harm we'll rend
our clothes in apple groves drunk on thunder & forever we
unlimited teenage werewolves with our skinny silver sophomore souls
clutching our holy inhalers to the matted fur above our hearts
UNLIMITED HOOLIGANS
i down pints of bitter & pound my chest i swear if we lose somebody
will bleed i swear if we win somebody will bleed the factories
rust-stained the canal hacking wounds through our cities i'm
wrought from balloons & fury & my father's rough hands on the
back of my head i hold my breath til my limits give out my firm
too firm static up my spine in the buildup copper in the back
of my throat when the ball rockets top corner a collapse of air
in my coal-streaked lungs in the cobbled alleys after the whistle where
the buildings lean in drunk to wring song from a strip of sky
the collision of flesh & bone & booze these hooligans with their
fists clenched around matchday like a brace of dead pheasants
these hooligans begging forgiveness from tomorrow these
unlimited hooligans splitting open at the seams with a joy
like an animal learning to speak & choosing to curse
return to ISSUE ONE