Brandon Shimoda

A GIANT ASLEEP IN FORTUNE'S SPINDLE




I, with a slight injury, was human
And you were human too
People now dressed in top fashion with long skirts
Are human
And people buried with no one to look after them
Are human too

Grandchildren, mind you
Sitting, reading
Correcting the manipulations
For example I am not your rightful granddaughter
With good legs describing perfection in fire
Racing over the black roof as a gray tree swinging a stunted hick may
be a wind-flattened hammer of land, a giant steadying for the worst

Purple hair on a brown head. The whitest
Gotten away with
Yellow head
Weighed by strenuous floss. A pink body walking the shoulder of a busy road
To meet the blister she is giving herself to
Hands clutching a tiny trophy, and yet
When is the pink body going to stop stuttering and care?
Living human beings twenty-seven years ago who were no better than rags


Shimoda is a fleshpot of inferior rank is the first line of a poem
that bears the imprint of lopsided children raised in exactly that
manner of irresponsibility
And that is that family
Clad in long skirts, regardless of gender
With a hand on the fluttering water is a gorgeous cheek again also

But I am different. I am not your rightful grandson
Hanging from blood thousand trees
Language in its infancy to an infant mind
Neither a familiar party
Nor one of earth’s many wondrous accessories
Struggled up
And over a severely arched bridge
Startled by the majesty of trees along the coast
Accretion of earth in spots, accounting for the isolationist aspect of
trees bunched in mounds

There are indigenous voices resounding in a half-digested ear
Waiting for the bellow to smoothly pinch
The gamboling children
Free
Once
And for all I have done I am done with you
How many times can this be said he said
So he says point blank
It is your future or mine. Either leave me conjoin me or detonate




THE PREGNANCIES



Brandon Shimoda was born on the west coast of North America. His collaborations, drawings and writings have appeared in print, online, on vinyl and on walls ... and most recently in Lake M: Book One (Corollary Press) and The Bowling, with Sommer Browning (Greying Ghost Press). He currently lives on the west coast of North America.

Amy McDaniel

REQUESTING INFORMATION

Please tell me your best

facts about animals.  I’m asking

everyone.  I’ll begin.

The Tasmanian devils are being wiped

out by a frightful epidemic—like the

bees but worse.  The epidemic

is actually called Devil Facial

Tumour Disease.  It is communicable 

within the species via bites 

or especially vehement sex.

To sex a sea urchin, you tap it until

it emits a thin puddle of egg or sperm.

What if this worked on other things!

Imagine wondering what a thing is.

For the price of a few pats on the back,

the thing releases onto your

palm a frank sample, a tiny

pool of its own essence, meaning,

and being. 

Maybe in another lifetime.  Most

things are coy in our world. 

They are couth. 

Amy McDaniel writes for HTMLgiant.com and helps run the Solar Anus reading series in Atlanta. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in matchbook, Alimentum, Tin House, Porchlight and The AgricultureReader. She co-edited From the Second Line, a collection of her students’ personal essays about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Her chapbook, Selected Adult Lessons, is available from Agnes Fox Press.

David Brazil

IN your treatment room

    a 'run-on' line

    is a huge liability

    as they wonder

      qua aletheia

  what does she do when she enters?

      (as I myself did for a long time

   both of these assume a common language

      cited in the opening

        as we know from the fragment of a system




***************************



but now the ship-wrecked mariner

    might lead philosophy

  full of objects

and coming to terms with a loss

    through the early phases

  as the quoting source informs us

      concepts of pistis

from the only sphere

    (in the space of the other)

      in her exile

picking out the rhythm



David Brazil was born in New York and lives in California. With Sara Larsen he coedits TRY!, a xerox periodical. A chapbook of his daily writing, "Spy Wednesday," is forthcoming from TAXT Press.

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RealPoetik
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