FROM HANK
($(%*^U&
because you can stand on
a rotten moose liver all
day in maine in a big old
rain and i still love you
sheet shake flea bane rain
would love to
fatten you up to eat
you? to heath bar you to
heath bar wrapper in
the shit of a bear just that just wrapper
and berry seeds doing
the spangle squat gear
out there in front of
god and everybody because
bears are not toilet people
bears are honest americans we void everything
behind a white flag and a toilet’s
conversation with a septic
stopped outside
lost a whisker off the hair shirt of truth
with a truck with a man
made his fortune hauling
shit spits outs his window
lady didn’t see it fly
come home rust kids
with the papers to buy
the aerials of their farms
took the yearling flight
it’s nice to see us high
it’s good for conversation
that’s where we are at
guess
where’s my heart?
barn or silo or house like
an eyelid on a sheep sly
little seagull with a belly
like a barn where were you born?
like a shoe in the road dozers
the mind toward bouldering
the septic pump bill in one
leap over the flaming candle kitchen table
that’s his revelation
there’s shit for money
i been thinking why don’t i build
houses with windows designed
to open out to pines
shallow roots sandy soil a good hard wind
and my windows would go the further
god bless the ten twenty ants with their thirty
forty legs stuck on
nostalgia’s sucrose cement
like eyelashes in honey in the car
finish wrecker sap off a creaky creaky snap snap pine
but then seeing goes south as ya grow older
still there’s a sandbar in every deep promise
so my windows take you further over time
right now pine sap candle slaps
them sapsuckers
hanging out there by willow
never call your kid by the name of a sad tree
parked by them damn dick drip pines what’s
the capital of thailand see and then i
kick you in the balls
with a jag of blind eye
and a pack of burdock cheroots my i
is in this idea i i.d. the line of them that picket
to bring back that window tax you’d think
as the kids fatten we’d be heading
that way anyway houses like vinyl beats
living in an elegy for trees and get this
the vinyl squeaks in a good wind a safe
cracking song guy’s getting paid good
to board up your seeing’s seats and this one
channel up high like 200 to show
what goes on outside it’s four guys with guns
a bird one poet guy or gal can’t tell
the channel’s like an ultrasound what
swings low? that a simile prone pencil
or a pack of smokes you save from
the rain with the denim lid on a pocket
and a bold cupped hand
there by the channel that shows you the freeway
old men can’t sleep wonder would the taillights
would the red lights light red if my eyes
didn’t burn for the gal in the grocery
maybe 22 that’s a gun am i fit for the
charnal or the carnal that’s a wash the
price of doing business with an indoor
flame try ombudsmen with burning sticks
milling in the library parking lot
touch a cloud tickler
tickling the prostates on them chinese
fireworks pointed out over the river
lord my heart is stuck to my ear
and my ear is just a wrinkly
extension of fear of
breaking bones on a radio
a western torture a fallen
horse dust was a breath mint
crunched by teeth evolution
took years to shorten our wider set
of hippo trending chompers
for fibrous matter once you are
into rotten meat and sliding
back up that cheetah tree teeth
slip small as half dissolved aspirin
as headstones via aerials
them three poking through
viva great uncle cretin clyde
tight as the space
between a rock and its mosses
two sister kin too took the
typhoid in ‘00 and ‘19 and
been mary huggers
ever since fat slob preacher
kicking my ass against a window
on a bus through curvy mississippi
i got a pistol and a bible in this
box and i am fixing to use either one
sooner stave the mary light
off the crouching passing
animal eye click of the
knife on the teeth his habit
when he’s thinking
bless the chord in the neck
of the running wolverine
plum the keep
deep the stranger
here we go
am i trying you
trying on coat or prolix?
here’s the butter so cold you
can’t cut it here’s a
grackle all spanish dancer by
the muffin crumb here’s an elegy
for gravel it goes ore villa one-stop shunt
Abraham Smith hails from Ladysmith, Wisconsin. Action Books published his Whim Man Mammon and will publish his Hank in the coming autumnal season. Smith's recent performative laurels include stints at the Academy of American Poets Rooftop Reading Series and Opium Magazine's Literary Death Match NYC. He teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at University of Alabama.