RYAN SKRABALAK

ANATHEMA

Where are my torn cushions, copper clouds
            “Great American Songbook” I’m calling you, I'm
So high in fiberglas winter, the flossed out rock salt
            Lace pastures go to sleep in stepdaughters’
Time machines, pink headlights, cicadas
            Summer calls surnames, robots doze
Ears to the tender doorjamb o! Sometimes
            Quaker father of oil, electric light I prefer
To refuse—only for him crying in the glossy holly
            Hymn you glitter coarse & honey oceanly
Pulling away hot tin flutes from tongued pulse
            Sweeter than fruit that we’ve grown & shined
Our man in the aquarium of his decision
            Pleading a common moisture to remember
Conversationally leading a horse to joyous fracas
            Ah but you’ll lavender away even then, zodiac
Riding upon two acres of laminated blonde god cocks
            With every sunrise these highways ejaculate
Starry detention, adorned with sissy motherfuckers
            Like us. Shimmer in your holy season on the river
Sits the wealth of the nation we wish to destroy
            Where the Venus of all things hangs
Like an expired passport, the fires of banks warm us
            Gently as evening pirouettes into frost, the sound
Of a cloud forming: you, those sugared hours
            Three Winstons bright enough now to think
Half a soul ballad, which depends. Tell your friends I was wrong.

EXOSKELETON 1

Here is the church and here is the steeple –  another blue pill in the morn – lifetime piling up in the corners of spaces where I do lovely, horrible things – the scaffolding somehow edible and freeing – mostly for show – the moon following you as a child – strawberry jam on a park bench – hailed the wrong car – I warned you folks – I am on some other kind of quest – set the table in the reactor core – this wreath of childhood is interstate salt and bread crust – this wreath of September is fluorescence and oil – yet they both hang on the same red door – verbs take me out, reel me about the shiny fields – then never call me again

Utopia glides its spit onto my hole – authority’s smile comes from its comprehension – you made it this far without considering empire – the tinny thunderclap of the produce mister – yes, softly to me what a garden provides – I let you down twice in this kitchen – in the rip of the future I took a colorful rest – he is the boss of me – a long freakish emerald lutz – please continue looting all major cities of the world

Prison-drunk on the color of anticipation – color is anticipation – how to shrink the feeling – a mellotron episodic bloodflow of bauhaus lovelies – I stood before the grand-stand, a gathering of lies bending in the night air – above the crowd – fine, that will do – accept the eyes everywhere, the flailing hospital – sweet earth flying – the bus taking me deeper in to the wish – butterscotch metropolis – night lords wounds – the structure of hounds – a bad man in the room, isn’t that glish – but breaking is beautiful – a sky searching for the scar of plane – I left some love in the house of old songs – glowed in its sexual pistou – a fantasy growing mold – a pulpit

Wynonna Judd belts Tell me whyyyayayay – a big block motor and a porch of ex-girlfriends – comets at the dump – you better say good-by – you better count yourself among the lucky – you better watch your mouth – cow-eyed wading

towards each other amongst the billboards – rural assonance – the dollar tree sibyl – o spasm of night, for what are you waiting – simply setting myself up to be disappointed – specifically perfidy to a bloody Chevrolet – but the sun-chiseled mountains

AD HOC SONNET

Years have passed but I suppose Hello
the best place for trauma appeared
at last where the river augmenting
between rocks, a surgical procedure
scored for moonlight & tape recorder
my elm nakedness against rippling
night low pulse, noble gases, slanted
blood. And knives arranged in the beer-
light. (Love is) overwhelmed by ones
we are most to trust―outside the window
there were no tricks. I have come to prove
my terrific patterns weeping by the zirconic
casino boat. Glitter dribble so effete
I would swerve in alien candelabra
contralto deer rain sang went out,
sour. Evening celibate blue pyramid, head
bright now with oils, I walked by vast
all-night dogs under porches
This is the coliseum of love, all welcome
turn to the rosy crowd O there red harvest
finding your hand in mine swells a field
January turns puddles to swift jewels
we tell no one grief holds its breath
inside graphite, telling the bare core
of the story its own advice. Nitrogen rises
to complement the earth. Just smoke
learning how to dance. Take good care,

TURNPIKE

I bucked through the screen door      to float away
            on the topaz chords of tenderness, feeding them
                        my sweat,    prissy, on all the front porches of the world
            waiting for god, all-night hounds knowing the distances
                from my heart to yours   a warm, fleshy transmission
      In this strain of a dream, your grief
                        pours into me, a Polish
            lullaby:   why can't you comfort
                        wet kisses or the smell of sperm      
                    moaning viaduct shedding damascene
                                    echoes in sly brooks and your loyalty
                        to some spring you've never shown me
                                    but I know its yarny sound, time signature         
       I am the river your father told you not to worry about          
   there I go, drugged, polluted, killing bald eagles
                       one generation at a time     This is not the story
                  about the boy who learns a valuable lesson      in an oak
            I am going to tuck myself in         to the dreamwork of the turnpike
                        action without machine, just fluids, building
                          a stammering folksong of hand-me-down lips
                          quivering on the underused shoulder of the off-ramp
                             light and its somatic quilt, a permission
            I am not talking about death I am talking about
                keeping an orgasm with the earth

FUNNY HOW THE NIGHT MOVES
after Margie, thanks Margie

Today I am made of paper but logical

in   our   individualist   jello   (lime)   we   are   spells
suspended     in      the     tiger     striped     afternoon
narration,   which,   hitting   the  forkful   of   golden
couscous  in  front  of   me,  “has  me”  not  thinking
about  production,  or  being a part of this  arbitrary
grammar that I am feeling stomp about, the  topsoil
of   sound   makes   a   powdery  arc  at   this  table, I
worried     to      warm,     consenting     to    life,    the
punishment of a fact,

the afternoon braids a slow opal / up through the snow / a finger or a question

everything is exciting in terrible new ways
sleeping in a motey beam, effete for the gearbox
half liberated, half fingering the asshole
of power, not spending time but passing it,
a coiffure twisting this spectral serotonin reuptake
or a somatic gesture, a hand on a thigh, postulate,
I am stripping the armor, but I am stripping myself too
they are merged, vascular, gills, a remora mushrooming,
communal, cilial, a network, a bright, minty choir,
a veiny, pink execution

of dirty work / for whom, changeling / a bonfire's licking shadow / a domestic pilsner

  in a Dixie cup, a V-6 motor in an heirloom watermelon
  field, snapped from the glitch, milky, glissandoed clouds, breeze
  unsticking the cash back, long correction, xeroxed glass, kinetic
  minaret, Guyanese gold incarnate display, winding the watch,

an enfleshed rondeaux / or sea of electrons stirred into a bank holiday

loose animus, local bus, magnetic kiss, “sleepytime
tea,” a roasted motto, sottovoce, “an army of lovers”
baying on the quad, takes the square, “takes
the street”, halal banner, paper trail, ibuprofen, “soft spoken,”
laced together, deepest well, frothy brouhaha

I ate the dose, the square / it made no difference

the unshook echo, penal ribbon that follows
me, shake the speedometer, the cautioned metal
needle, a dashboard caramelized in the late February
grey, burnt in, nest egg, a mission, a firesale, the melody
of falling profit, a pittering, exponentially, plainly,
“a fresh, long lasting feeling,” a splint, a net worth

in the tuning of this our street / the texture of a neighborhood, sputtering

I am not in 440 if you are following along, icy city, losing
the carnal, the bloom, peeling off the corporate destabilizing
cloister, waltzing through the night’s curriculum, dinosaur
magnolia, recalls a future, twilight’s twizzled perm, bounding
antelope, eggy rigor of spring, Waterford crystal,

each promise delivers its own narrative / a wave across the water triangulated

  the old lips of edict, learning to spurl like a lie, spilled
  from a brick, promised to a face, beholden to a dream,
  smoldering patrol car, genuflected a Fendi, lexical
  enema, never clear, a salvaged grim frieze, fertile data

for a morphology of the useless / we're suspended over the current

learning to sing, what can we use singing for, honing for rupture,
a chord that shapes thou differently, quilting, standing on the scorched
bonepile of where we felt pleasure, thou who wished the volume
of warmth, brushed sound on some of it, kissed it, thou who bounds
from our commodity form to briefly leave its silicate skin in the hedges.
A low depressive travel plaza, you in the golden hour of our lie
across your face, well, it burnished a simple

hello / I'm not me you can't prove anything / remove it from stock

DUO EXCHANGE (1973)

“and look who’s coming. it’s the world’s corrosion”
                                                                                                —Fred Moten

dear S ,, it’s a communion                                       of departure
            this exit has no machine gun                      weather
                 sinning out onto the front porch
            it feels                        no patrol ,, no cybernetic bird
      licking the thumbprint of an interruption
  no police van          at the park’s zenith ,,
no credit oasis .  no magnesium
                                    hypermart or
                        parking garage                      to echo or chorus .
            floodlights                             on the people's intersection
                          feeling    no gaze .   but the creamy starlight
                                                stumbling                   down the borax
                                                                                                            capillaries

            no no new york to catcall . no erotic citadel
                        to kiss .  no one to make it stop . no gesture
                                                to reel it in
                                                to steal home   // birds cordon its gemmy vapor
                        it swells ,,  ducks underground for train
            listening as it moves                                    towards another
                                    away from filigree ,, earthen                      bits, brick
                        from one conch to the next, filled gold
                        and without limit ,, an interior world
                              its face incomplete without          another face
                        the fog within it ,, the gemini             quadrant
            it rides the bus to the end
               of itself ,, the machine                  blooms with faces
                        so grainy and hopeful ,,                  warm-tended gardens
            sighing through the beautiful and ragged
                                                                        neighborhoods ,, past
                                                                                  homes of lovers ,,
                                                coupon-fucked          alleys ,, hedges
                                                                        of wire ,,     closed-circuit
                                                                                    statues ,, hot
                                                                                                glowing stadia

            reaching the terminus
                        to exhale its pewter . briefly
                                    screaming ,,
                                                shaking
            a currency                  created with each transaction               
                  karate the blue and massage the               wet dirt
            like a sailor from memory ,, to hail                       a goodbye
            pull away from the grammar ,, the negociant
                huddled in the wachovia vineyard
                        verbs ,, &c. ,, whittled from petroleum
            colluding all and owing nothing                            dear you ,, S ,,
               all mohair tendencies  ,, summoned groves
                                   swinging back door and dinner whistle
            all rippling grasses ,, bells in the diageo sun-bank
                        the weather is the stanza .   calvary of nouns
                                    in line at the deli ,, lighting a smoke

cumulonimbus          valve ,, oyster            of voice
                        awakening a limbic salve ,, late for coffee
                                    a break in the rain .              or an idea of clarity
                                       an ongoing recital                       ascending from sorrow
                                                to the silver hot roof ,, valerian radiates
                                    of an unsure dialect             buffering         moonlight
                        filling and emptying                                     the eyes of magi
                                                at an unleaded pump                       $3.49 9/10   
                                                            or a jasmine stall ,,    a calmed hypermarket
                                                            love deluxe .   a sonnet for marx
                                                rich in the memory of others
                                             a free library ,, an embassy ,, reality
                                                            an obstacle  ,, an ossuary
                                                a dormitory of the future    the two-choice lie:
                                                              you pick ,, maimed by numbers
                                                                        killed by filters ,, this industrial appendage
                                                                        careened into itself . a hand ,,
            sometimes                  you can trust violence
                                                we hold on the mossy verso            of a jurassic coda,
                                    a dream          grafted on a dream              grafted
                                                               on the promise       of our crescendo ,,
                        connective tissue pulsing                            on the lam
                                                or the soft      cool air above the river

Ryan Skrabalak is a poet from Upstate New York currently living in Windham County, Vermont. He is the author of the chapbook Jelly County (Quick Books, 2019). Some of his work has appeared or is forthcoming in CLOG-online, Urgency Reader 2 (Queer.Archive.Work, 2020), The Dream Closet: Meditations on Childhood Space (Secretary Press, 2016) The Poetry Project, Ursus Americanus, Stone Canoe, and DELUGE, among others.