Poem to Kill a King
Love small and good. Love egregiously. Elegiacally. Love the nose cut from some other face. Love the face. The redbud. The fire. Love instead of loving. Love a little bender. Love a sulk. Reframe the question, dra-ma-tic, it all leaks out, out the window, wrongest thing. Love goat and fence. Love the dumb win. Love the dreaming during dream. Love best avoided. The red door. The dead apple. Scabs picked. Love backtrack and technique and insignificance. Love the yellow-bellied. Love concrete statue and glass bauble and curly willow. Love the story that’s not spectacle. Love plurality and shimmer. Play someone else’s body, love. Common, common, between eyes, honeyless, a desire a sadness. To be poet. Is this something. Love the deeply suspicious, their humble work. Love barf. Dust. Fog. Love the hands on. The mud the bracken. Love what is happening. All this and the end. All the ends of this.
Dave Brennan lives in Virginia and teaches at James Madison University. He is the author of the forthcoming book Headroom in Hell (Spuyten Duyvil), as well as A Cyborg’s Father: Misreading Donna Haraway (punctum books), A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit (Bateau Press), and others. His poems have appeared and are forthcoming in Lana Turner, Conduit, swamp pink, Tyger Quarterly, The Midwest Quarterly, ANMLY and elsewhere. Find him online at Substack.