Issue # 14 : January - June 2011

Chris Martin

The Owl
The Girl

The Owl
for Alex Lemon

Durer’s dour
little owl
stares strangely down
from his perch
on the bathroom wall
already less here now
cornering the brain in waves
whose peaks and dips duly
fritz a garish cough of feathers
into the corpse-light morning air
that my piss has tricked
cacophonous yellow diving free this
is what they mean
reproaching solemnity in fits
of strange glee
or crushing dissatisfaction
into breathable
red powders
we spiraled outward
left the city
took part-time work
freaking the ancient wood
into gusts of ion readiness
I brought you this owl
in case you needed each other
dawning negative at newly liminal cusps
is that what you mean
about god arriving in seizure
his horses just horses
baroque relentless and electrical
to hoove through
the body’s flummox
I’m always
this pregnant
with everyone’s child
unruly gut sprung
into tendrils of unknowing
most are thrill offenders
but I’m stuck here programming
flowers as another war arrives

The Girl
for Andrea Arnold

Night grass’s
fast twinkles
threatens to collapse
the wet eye
as it shivers over
a girl’s bloody nose
just off the English highway
it’s strange to us both
how our skin never actually touches
except through the congress of magnetism
but does it constitute form
in the way language does?
I left the movie
feeling emptied by resilience
a brilliant emptiness
like returning home
at night
from some
simple day’s journey
but does home
constitute form or magnetism?
I left the house
because it felt like form
was taking over each room
and this life made of stanzas
this little song I made swerving
through them and the night
was more about the girl
crying by the English highway
with the twinkling grass
than it could ever
be about me
the cat purring
and biting
the buttons
off my shirt
an old mobile
of drowsy paper owls
now alert and watchful
over the cramped living room
which is filling with words
as fast as you read them