George Kalamaras


Other Things

Sometimes when I sleep, outside things enter me.
Last night it rained. I woke full of bleach.

The corona of a dead bird passes as knowledge.
We live as sparrows and resemble our pain.

Raw of gray morning.
Raven blood marking the scar of our sleep.

It takes me a long time to polish a mirror.
I keep considering the possibilities of other births.

Across the great water, my mother is a concubine in
green corduroys. She speaks by melting Patagonia ice.

Part of my scar has been mutilated into something
beautiful. They dropped concrete blocks onto the
bodies of dead soldiers.

I have never and always. I have thirst for and have
not parade. They propped blocks of soot on the fallen
bodies of bugs.

I have recorded the names of three insects I adore.
Recalcitrant. Suture. Winged bleed.


Ichnite

I’ve dreamt your broken clavicle as pure sound.
There are sumac leaves in the bowl, a hesitation,
a qualm.

My yellow energetic house lingers amidst the sound
of fallen lingerie. You woke imprinted with a shirt full
of bleached nostrils.

Okay. I am convinced my flesh makes me ache like
a caught carp. She stared at the bowl as if the swirling
water somehow was home.

Do you know whether the withered deutzia derives
compasses of snow? Can you sleet my, leave open the
wood-maybe of an enormous bid?

Throwing out your lust like dice is a rough galaxy. Galaxy,
as a metaphor, might mean a hardship of stretching?

I have lain flat, seen the x ray of her lower lip. I am
contained in what constrains her whale-bone corset.

A future of sea-lice? A kind acceptance as what if,
but maybe not ever? Remains in the thatched skirt
suffocate the geese with snow.

When Vallejo was in jail, James Joyce was making
life to a shadow of a wife. To leap from sumac stem
to Chinese cabbage fields is half a mulberry mood.

I pour water onto the head of every tired dead. Upon
each sting. Ichor leaves. Spaghetti-strapped breath
measures the weight of breasts. Dreams my weeps.


Freshly Washed Blood

So, Andre Gide lit a bush fire that night in Bosoum, on
his way to Fort Archambault. This was the early thirties,
and still it feels like maybe tomorrow.

What lies in front of arriving at an unfinished library?
Where do we begin, and what do we need that we
keep confidential, even from ourselves?

And who says, because a particular child’s menstrual
cycle gave sailors the star-scraped path of navigation?
Among all the universal crises, how might the crown
jewel of blanket sleep infuse us with freshly washed blood?

I remember one life as a porter in Bosoum, hearing leopard
yowl in the bush faintly smelling of an even earlier birth as
a plane tree shouldering sunken moons.
What have I carried over all these centuries that I thought
had been impossible to kill?

Well now, a thunderous doorway might be the last moment I
wear a shirt. My mother was born in 1934. Where do I begin?


Adoration

I spent my butterfly years in the belly of a brown pheasant.
You can explore anything as long as you’re sincere.

Can we break a mirror and mean unexcited lightning? Can
we ask ourselves backwards how best to crawl into sleep?

The significance of a seven-year beetle infestation bottled
in bed linen suggests muslin wrapping the dead?
When the cave door opens, footfall becomes a divine rasp.

I was nonchalant about history, thinking a botched fiasco
was an extraordinary vision.
Because my moon taxi somehow recalled Dali, I drank its
contents like stolen rainwater.

He’s a contradiction locked in his own jaw. When his wife
screams adoration, they both bow down to themselves.

Perhaps I have collapsed on the new sofa cushion for a
reason. If you find it, fill my belly with unspoken game.