Jason Zuzga (Philly, USA): Four Poems

LAST DROP

Cross pixilated ditches, cross hazard roar.
Where you wing a ball against a brick
Wall and get someone else. The chalk
Sloughs to score coastal terrace, points
Run cross concrete, like water,
Like heel of blue paint. Lie
Seeding among reeds and beer glass thimbles.
Lost you field in waves of dissolve
Contra same. Be lick of flame
To log. Be licked by flame-warmed dog.
Here be calm store of holiday nuts.
Here be jarred soups with low salt.
Is warm. Is just so calamity.
Time bites words that spot time's purl.
Caught in back flip, arm to small back's stretch.
Swing in held still and faces
Of cartoon cats. Knife comma stick.
Shine in march pants, shot
Deer leaping through
Dusk's bruise of suffice.
Oh glide of blade.
Oh weeping ice.


DETRAINING

We lug our lovelorn tubes
In sacks of blown glass,
taffied plastics, barges
Crimped by nailed-on tires.
Do we ask love once. If.
Again. To skin the seal in two.

A seal holds form to sea.
Hold smooth—held sealed—
Hold still—unfurl coyote tone and tack
It still so as to form a place
Beheld. Now look:
To the left there is aught to see.
And on the right there is nothing at all.

Do we ask the piper's ass if it do love
To lug for us. Do we love each ass in heat,
Each odd-toed ungulate and whelping seal,
The length of each rat's tail. Oh yes.
Ask love if we do press our pants together fast.
If we do sing true tones to plants.
If we do this here. And if we do this there.
And back. And then. If we
can then behold ourselves
Beheld. The dawn shears fear
To shaped form's tool.
Stent releasing dawn to day,
Placed just so in vein.
And yet. And then.
We wake on lawn and tween to peer.
To sky beheld. In green.


BLOOD TROUBLE

Dust in raindrops are atomic babies.
They build a city in my heart.
They harness the power of carbohydrate.
There is an electric biscuit in the rain.
There is an attic where he waits.
Chisel a heart, a city of power.
Fasten the hinges to the crystal dogs.
Hind legs chug chug churn.
There are babies on the train.
Attics glisten open to a pine dream.
Lenses reveal texture, pools of gathered babies.
There are attics birthing in the babies
Hind legs chug chug churn.


AN ARC

Gorgonians chipper in the tide
Weigh on your brain
I'll pull you through the scuba war
The green cloud of concern
The starfishes affixed to your face
And your screen and your mask bright orangepink
Saltine impatiens burp out birds
When you kick them
And the bird in your hand can twist into
A model of democracy, two wings with a funny face
That I could push into your skin like a stilled drill
[One time I found a dead bird with a maggot in its eye socket]
Okay but I won't. The buddy system intact,
I fasten magnets
To your oxygen kitchen
to allow your legs to wave their rubber fins
The water blinds with thick green life
Any huge self-propelled birds
Meters away and closing in
The lavish pencilfish roll by fast
If time gets plugged shut, if the future
When you kick it
meters away
begins to purr before it arrives
on the back of the starfish's
lost leg
million feet working
together with collaborative suction
buddy system appears
intact and growing
a brain-like thing


© Jason Zuzga 2008