This poem has been published in the 2009-2010 Nameless Magazine print issue.
Short Story About an Ordinary Man
william likes to play canfield
and write about small objects,
like woodland creatures with little yes-eyes
bright as pine nuts tarred up, with frilled hairs
and tiny paws, and the clicking nails on them.
he lives in Idaho green and garbled
with its flatland hills and houses
and tails of grass and wheat tufting up.
william too often feels like he is wearing
some other man’s body like badly fitting boots
which insist on pinching him.
in the mirror william thinks
his nose is the shape of a lopsided tumor,
or a half deflated balloon,
and he whittles his hours watching it,
shavings of time curled on the sink like tiny claws.
william thinks his nose cannot be his own,
as his tales are his own, of
“this little chipmunk
has a bright little nose
that twitches and glints”
which he writes in Idaho, which is where
Scribner’s Panic Grass blooms.
it grows all around william’s
little house wrapped in the close sky
and blooms in Spring, when all grasses and wheats bloom,
when ground squirrels
are most brazen and bedizened,
when william takes a ball-peen hammer,
which is usually used for setting rivets,
to his nose and splits it open like a flushed kernel of wheat.
Short Story About an Ordinary Man
william likes to play canfield
and write about small objects,
like woodland creatures with little yes-eyes
bright as pine nuts tarred up, with frilled hairs
and tiny paws, and the clicking nails on them.
he lives in Idaho green and garbled
with its flatland hills and houses
and tails of grass and wheat tufting up.
william too often feels like he is wearing
some other man’s body like badly fitting boots
which insist on pinching him.
in the mirror william thinks
his nose is the shape of a lopsided tumor,
or a half deflated balloon,
and he whittles his hours watching it,
shavings of time curled on the sink like tiny claws.
william thinks his nose cannot be his own,
as his tales are his own, of
“this little chipmunk
has a bright little nose
that twitches and glints”
which he writes in Idaho, which is where
Scribner’s Panic Grass blooms.
it grows all around william’s
little house wrapped in the close sky
and blooms in Spring, when all grasses and wheats bloom,
when ground squirrels
are most brazen and bedizened,
when william takes a ball-peen hammer,
which is usually used for setting rivets,
to his nose and splits it open like a flushed kernel of wheat.