allegiance

choosing poets, out of town, like choosing a date

choosing poets, out of town, like choosing a date never use love in a song. but never is long. and always just as wrong. —pure horsehair number one reminds you of staring at video boxes and dreaming in new york. how you pack up all your black-and-white photographs and move to new york. chop off your hair instead of getting some dumb tattoo. his face is quarter-cropped in the camera box and you can imagine drinking with him by a dumpster. in the second poem, he mentions rats, and you think of the rats whose glare you tried to return in the subway. how it was like they were waiting for something. he’s good at these words and they look like sticky stars on the tops of new york skyscrapers. he is as wiry as the nervous boy who sat next to you for both semesters of shakespeare. but it is like he is waiting for you to fall off the platform. no one makes such pretty discoveries this consistently. the you who would buy this book really wants to be lied to. number two takes on rebellion, but renders it in the colors and tin tunes of a circus . corners, with him, you would take on new limbs. he reminds you of boys who never told you their secrets, but who would wear your eyeliner in public, on a dare. you probably share the same myopia, but he has adjusted to the strain. you might 37 both breathe hard at the same altitude in the northwest, but in the misty mountain rain, he knows how to swerve a squirrel on a winding road. he has a billy tuft of hair under his lip—it all seems metaphysical. he graffiti sketches flower bombs on warehouse walls and rides the ferry to bainbridge to twirl fire with his friends on their organic farms. you’d buy him for the same reason you started hiking, for fear of the dirt. he might make your body wilt the right way, but he’s also too good at making things. you’d both supine mumble at each other. there’s a natural oat to his fingertips. he says tell me and doesn’t mean it. it is your job to say it just right, so you leave the wild wheat in his eyes. but number three. well, number three lives in alaska. his picture makes you sad. he reminds you of the men you shot pool with in phoenix. who rented rooms by the week. who only stopped smiling long enough to get down a shot. who tried hard not to mention their ex-wives. who tucked in their black rock band t-shirts. whom you didn’t fuck, and who didn’t ask. in their motel rooms, legal papers littered their shelves propped up by cinder blocks. you could always smoke in their rooms. his name is joseph. his hair is parted asymmetrically, which seems to have something to do with what you’ve already lost and what you think you will never find again. of lake towns, like this one, where women’s bellies emerge and slip out from under not-so-feminine khaki. of women who barely flick an eye over their velcro dress straps. this one walks the cold beach, but the fugue is soft. joseph. the babies his book wants to seep from young girls and their pine-tall stances. the men, expectant worriers, who hold up their women in line for coffee. the perfume of wideband miniskirts wash down the sandstone wall. 38 joseph ... lay back alaska. run through its strong bays. the couples here bow to the weather. in summer, they share gelato from a green cup. but in winter, they will sip ice from one another’s teeth. someday, visit yourself here with me in our new town. the cold doesn’t seem to bother you, so i think we could love anything. the setting sun will cut up these women’s mouths and then we can set it all out to freeze. we could carry our guns together. we would stink of the smoke from burning the weekly trash. our bodies would grow hair underwater and the contrast would curl into seaweed and sharks. which you would skin. and lay the bones into flaccid bells. clink, to alaska. to alaska missing its scales. before skin could smoke...