ISSUE 9

Finnegan Bly

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Landscape: aim at

remember you're home. where you're freer to be the gun.
to be the hammer, switch and sink drain stopper. dehydrated
arms heavy like waterlog as you hold. freer here
to shoot back, with pose like in anime you watched
late night, adult swim, tentacle thing in a diaper with fur. the living room a disorganized
tacklebox. a.m., cops plays. your bangs hang longer than the back of your head.
you thought it cool this way, how light tangled shade into your brow. remember those days
you had nothing tomorrow to do.

you didn't know this. i never told you.

how a ex-army farmer found three police cars in an orchard
and a Mexican man under an almond tree. he was like summer, shot-through
with heat. bursting plump with ripe fruit, red.
oral, he tells it not news, just a story at the barbeque,
his pistol holstered but ready for noise. feet of wet grass and water balloons. field of bud.
a sipful of shock and laugh: I saw a lot worse in Iraq.

 

bookmark. backroads. (silent siren) weird day.

 

you pick and choose. you shed the chin scruff geek and charm. highschool,
you porno in the backseat of the bus. on your phone. you sit aisle-side
to my window seat. you show it to me. skinny limb-d, speedo-d, gay. naked
drawn with lines like a camera covered in finger grease. shuttered
unshuttered. you bled sticky, sapped at me. ambered the moment, my eye.

 

nowadays, you post muscle on instagram. your hair's cut. has to be
you're navy now, meat and ocean. a hung carcass on a spit stick
twisting over wave reflection sunlight.
(silent cannon). fire. this is what you've learned to do. oh choiceless child, cadet.
remember, this is what is given you: the feeling of your bare feet on hot gravel stones
a reminder of the path off the tarmac leading home. a reminder
of the forest fires in the foothills. those summers of smoke.
the deer are running down. the deer are moving in. take aim. it's yours.
you've earned it.

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