Distant shit
and wet moss

laced through
what winter’s

left: radiated

rain, warped
window sill,

wind-seething
eucalyptus.


ii.

Ocean-shoved
cumulus cloud

incises horizon

held by hills
and radio towers’

red volleyed lights.


iii.

As if to pin
a thought

to the back
of my skull

    a humming-
bird pivots,
glares

through me
— its red-

metallic
throat a-

float
in fog.


iv.

From all corners here

stars confuse the dark.
Compound the dark.

Frog-chants in tandem

over a seasonal creek’s
flat, static whisk.

above a sidewalk blistered
white

with bird shit.


•


Low clouds shear the hills in half.


•


Not quite a false spring,
but a glare

gnaws the fringes of things —


•


the boundaries,
how they bleed

light bleeding

various invasives.

Night seeps
into its name.

At the edge
where black

oak clouds
an embankment

what I imagined
was silence

becomes enough
music for now —

the constellated
sounds

nouns

call out.

A 4.5 in. x 10 in. letterpress-printed broadside of a poem by Joseph Massey
limited to 100 copies can be purchased for $7.

Joseph Massey is the author of Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009) and eight chapbooks: Minima St. (Range, 2002; also available as a PDF download by clicking here), Eureka Slough (Effing Press, 2005), Bramble (Hot Whiskey, 2005), Property Line (Fewer & Further Press, 2006), November Graph (Longhouse, 2007), Within Hours (The Fault Line Press, 2008), Out of Light (Kitchen Press, 2008), The Lack Of (Nasturtium Press, 2010). Three chapbooks are forthcoming in 2010: Exit North (Book Thug), Mock Orange (Longhouse) and Won’t Say (OS Assemblies).

rifts litter erupt

into margins words

in a seizure

wound into boundaries

I drink to

dissolve patterns in

the middle of I think

through pronouns

the concrete rain scent

a snail intact

flowering morning

how the words splinter

undone museum of us

you gave me a weed and

I kept watering it

everything left

as we found it

three bees drone

parenthetical

to leaves’ red

green red patter

the best disguise

is this vexed

transparency

exchange
shape
with

light

with

water

•

                             

upturned
trunk’s
roots

caulked
by moss,
mud, what

sun

a web

snags
                             

                             
•
                             

mud-
blackened

creek bank’s
drainage

pipe’s
rolled

r’s
                             

                             
•
                             

stone wall
a few ferns
fallen          there
                             in place
                             

                             
•
                             

tree’s
red
bark

sounds
out

through
gnashed
brush
                             

                             
•
                             

no more than
water

articulates
light

under the
bridge

                               outside
the closed window.

                               

*

                               

Dangled above
the traffic’s rasp:

a contrail

a crow

a nail gun’s echo.

                               

*

                               
Light
a spider scales
one branch
to the next
      tilts

in time
with the wind.
      Wind

revising
shadow
stretched

on a flat
patch of
tan grass.

Limbs sieve
sky’s blot.

Needles
thread
the light thin.

Day crushed into


& out of itself.