Joseph M. Gerace

>Pulled flat like confectioners’ sugar settled by a light low wind one leg kicks over the futon’s shoulder drops beside yr prophesy like a body beneath the stars you lured in crickets laughing they’re home under the untamed fig all night you refuse his sweet song but pluck and pluck and smiling pluck.

>Imperfect mythologies swallow studied now bitter sweet waves from where Gone missing Dante’s crunch no accounting footprints in ash or Chaucer his village Proletariat and idiots beating rice paddies thigh high water syrupy with snakes Jain my daughter her child Maude just fallen Out of style again in a chrome stroller Jain of no command…

> Waiting Room #1 transfixed by me-ness the uniformity of actualization “Represent us! Dance our dance! These here our potholes Need your attention, now! You may ignore the other (he is (she is Not our handicap, nor is (he (she Spread upon our 12-grain bread Hand us that knife, and be prompt!” Panic There’s no…

>i always begin with i keep off immortalize slow hands in the dark red eyes type a mouse quivering mouth, i don’t want to begin with, i what is on your teeth? where might i go today? i know how to get there. the shoes with the weathered stitch i do not want to immortalize…

>Key is justify nothing & I’ve learned from living here Harden yourself but don’t Be bull-headed, I know poetry & my art will spit in yr face Surprise! It’s poison! Or It drips. Either accomplishes My task: I know pantoum, Villanelle, sonnet-sad phrases I know Ms. Dog, blood running From her fingertips, jumped To her…

>Flowers 2 All the flowers are dead What kind where they? No matter now The light is not quite right They cannot live. Grasslove Slow reptilian slithering underfoot the dewey brush Thrusting starward aspires to glove a wing pinch and twist All must fall when love fed by wine makes a wish

>JS is write teacher to. Loosen up! That’s it Now, associate thought with one day when i was a kid i found a blue dis. What really words Can do how they patter like rain in my hands, cool become hottt drops in a real panthers bound to catch thr. Patterns of loss cracked Something…

>Where is our future If you keep giving up I brush the rock, new fingers inhale, digest dirt under our bed stop writing bad checks brought my looking-glass to the bank bounced the tiny yellow ball off every wall ceiling floor in our progressively larger black room cut the crud from gummy sneaker soles Every…

>is that climbing a rock will eventually put you at odds with gravity, hand crushed inside an infinitely loving mother’s, you reach a blood-shaped moment where grinning fatality sticks and bops the dry, prickly seed cowardice rams down your throat, and without justification but cold stretch toward the nobler path. the attacking face. The point…

>life here is the thing of targetanyone jumping to their deathoff any appropriately high thing must surely have a target imaginethe incongruous bull’s eye our heartsplattered a bucketof yellow dyedropped from waist highwe know the thing must fall but wehope to give rise like a poet pantingso we give our ambition aimonto the new-sick stroller…