The Poem Is Material Made of Letters Held at Arm’s Length by Bevin Moeller

Artwork courtesy Texas Fontanella and John M. Bennett

 

The Poem Is Material Made of Letters Held at Arm’s Length

 

The poem’s an arm away letter air cloth

Unthere above where I understand cement

In the organs around my hips. Treeless,

The locked door clothes my arms with slate.

 

My mother’s hair, her peach moon chin

Like two letters as one question

The size of one person repeat themselves.

Tree the alert my actress friend learned, I’m linoleum.

People forget they could be rounded up to all pubes.

My father, a lavender flag, wants to curl.

Justin’s paper mirrors decorate the space between the moon and the earth.

I’m crude oil if a tulip melts.

No one thinks the four of us are family still.

 

Events make the triangles of their shadows

If they were construction paper in a sheaf.

These things follow me into the room –

Billboards for cloth they advertise in the dark.

 

My spine is part tree, part giraffe’s spine.

Heavier than pounds, I move like a tree if it dragged a tree.

The world is the size of a pearl,

Continents the ornamental geography of velcro.

I stop looking in the mirror temporarily.

Each letter I read flickers its hue

So night’s fan chews the felt quilt,

A machine doing guilt for me with its sound.

 

Clothes in their colors core days’ identities

And I have been wearing what flags do for countries.

Does the naked body have to be sexual

Because we are the animal whose hair halos

Cannot excuse the unlaugh of pubes

Or how small the penis really is when he walks nude,

His brain stuffed with hair, air his halo body of fear?

 

Night invaded the bathroom.

I ask to move out of the purple and black flag.

Instead of night cool it’s cloth after skin

With prescription follow up slaps.

Thread hangs from my dress instead of a spider.

 

Even facts sew protective ten point stars

On flags that would otherwise be the crashing into ten pillows

Against a wall if pillows were children’s stardust,

The girl’s French braids lifting the animal from her translucence.

She closes her eyes and laughs.

I have been living in a world

Where the imaginary and the real are clothes in a dance without people.