Summer Poem
(Jeppesen)

Tonight I'm like a tree with nothing to reflect upon. My own wrath couldn't appear less interesting from this perspective, and the fact that I'm going after you means that it's too late for me to already be there. Instead, you have to work to attain the pain of remembrance and be prepared for whatever it might bring to the surface - we're all lost when welling away in that corner. Or a surface dream, to the content we'll be clear as a mine, exploding on a puppet's breast. The sea dazzles us with her repercussions, the things she spews on shore and the secrets of her empty life. Maybe we'll learn how to read it all someday, to decode the debris we sift through each time a passive object comes to the fray. It's the polluted sphere we have to address on the ninth circumlocution, the tragic array of lifts spent in the dust of age and weathering, that false purity which serves as a reminder: don't piss on the toxic sun.

large slouch
(Wascovich)

total tentacles spiff the skinny men
bundled money hidden in an empty can
pay back is cherry
no make-up
zero parents
she's got the target to remember fitness
slip into a brown head bed
an undercover pillow guard
tempting a muscle move
blitz to a sheet of sorry
another state of criminal
another channel that wipes out memory
to the sounds of 4:00 a.m.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Travis Jeppesen's novel, Victims, is published by Akashic Books.

Matthew Wascovich's book of poems, Application Counter, is published by Slow Toe Publications.

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