Joyelle McSweeney


Developed Nation

Is this how a god returns from victory?
This is america. The boy sopranointo the doughnut-world.
Fresh from the fish-mold.Clattering out across the snow
to buy a paperknife,clutching a flier...
A test in harmonies.Here comes the perfect pitch-
it's white, it falls to the glove,showing its stitches. Here
comes the hot-front, stitched with flags
O beautiful he producethlanguage from everyplace
on his body, the roomwhere the heatcloud lifts to the ceiling...
the subcommander crouched in the stalkbed breathing
into his lily-season


Toy Bed

The bobcat poses in a tripod of rifles.
The crown of the emperor penguin slips down halfway
over his eyes. Light shades down bluely from the ice cliff
to the ice. Now thisis a salt marsh, but this can't have salt
or glass. The black wool beret is sodden and itches
and pushes my wet bangs down into my eyes
in little points. The field is flooded, floodened.
This has lost
its ice and good light. I slipped into the channel.
my thin nylon jacket soaked through right away.
Mud pouched in snaky curls inside it. I stood up.
Is there still time to walk
out, pitch a stick and read the current, fold back
the green felt cap, poke a feather through, remove
myself to higher ground? Inside the dry house, thinking.
What does the deer do, now, in the woods? He wears
a too-huge stylized rack. It pulls his head back
black-lipped to the sky, or pulls his head down
and he must graze and brood. It pulls
his lips and makes him smile. It closes his eyes.

-both poems previously published at Perihelion


A Caper

The hero with a hat over his face,
half in shadow, sharky crawl
goes up, up, up the ladder.
Inside, the child of the flying ace.
Inside, the nutmeat of infinite complexity.
It flyers like a diagram, the map of before
and how it looks now, above

the room, hit pause.

Down, down, down the ladder.
Buttons and little worry-toys fall from the hero’s seams.
It is easy to escape
on legs that fade-dissolve on contact with the lawn
and then your torso, then what you carry in and around your
arms. Then a revving of motors, and the ground itself
fucks off, stage right.

-previously published at Gut Cult


5 Statements For Action Yes

1. I was doing lines, it was a tuba. A Japanese girdle
strapped to my girth. My black hair flipped for the
flight pattern. See me from behind, in the future:
the yellow brass snagging lightyears off a tree and
sending them singing in a circle up the chute. Time
passing was an effect of the light. It added up, and
made a girth. It was in the future. It was not just for
me. For all alike bent into the iridiating mouthpiece.

2. Instead of an altar, a hole to bury noise. Also the
hole to produce it. Speak into my mouth. Split screen:
chambered sequence. Coned hats, wiry hair, a black
and white visage, the eye ringed with coal, khol or a
linked finger symbolizing stealth— no, cunning. Stiff
finicular robes trace a circuit, a chronicle read with the
feet through the maze. Genuflect: the genuine, ritual
feeling. Putting out feelers for the ritual birds.

3. The genuine ritual is an act written on index cards.
Tied with a ribbon in a sloping box. I leave the box in
the box or I pass it. When you check my inbox: Action,
Yes. When you pass with your garment accurately
indexing the weather, who could but zoom in on your
zonam, lady, that very temperate xone.

4. If I want to waggle it from the ramparts, fine. Fine
me. It: my broken-necked children, my handworked
regalia, the girdle which strangles me, my own broken
neck. My friend is sealed into the hyperbaric chamber
waiting for his wound to seal. I want to go wanting, my
own gold staircase paved with shoes, the staircase
crammed with my blonde body doubles. We are an
exercise, evidence of a drafting duel.

5. We wind the crystal stair like willow boughs like a hand
wrings the neck of a goblet. Rings on its hairy lands. Split
it, drink me. Grow big. Pour me into the strange, irregular
forma of the tidal zone. Where the hare has rested her body,
I shall rest my eggs. Resist it. Put an is in it.

-previously published Coconut Magazine


The Cock And Kettle

The ceiling sags,
water in a sock.
Lift it over the levee and into the next duchy.
Outside the lunchspot, the rooster swings
with brackets to its comb and tail.
It creaks and crows.
The trees go one way, the car another.
Minnowing around, meowing,
carombing in the bathtub down
into the next apartment.
On the mattress, the man swims
printed with ferns.

-previously published at Konudrum Engine Literary Review