sunscreen of the heart
i hear the future
stomping through mud
arriving in sun and fear
like a train crushing
the small villages it passes
through.
the cables are locked across the slaughterhouse.
blood
is so infected it runs green with a life of its own.
the songs we speak at midnight
curse us in the echoes: we
die
anyway.
water is sequoial; water grows everywhere that geometry
will let it and burns your face
like a
spore.
if you can drink a whispering ocean, bubbling with prayer,
unhatched weather is
never
born.
you live. you crawl on ice
in a silence huge as disemboweled
war. if you could balance
on the point
of
a
triangle, only once, the bleach would
spill from your eyes like rusted parasites: fossils
in wonderland
are young.
all the cities that have telescopic eyes
sprinkle
from
the face of the earth,
unbent as
pillows unslept:
but watch your pincushion swamp;
watch
the paraffin worms bury the skin of time
in crenellated graves.
i will slip on the gravel
of a future that chokes itself.
you will wander like ivy in a brownfield,
clinging to ghosts.
zoonotic change
a little worm of a thing,
careful
when parasitizing, becomes
lifeblood
bludgeoned senseless
but still crawling
on sprouted legs;
is a mushroom on dead wood;
is a gopher unlikely to burrow;
is a wheelchair unoccupied at the top of a staircase;
and is salivating in a
delicatessen
without bread.
species are transient as cinders in wind
but, smart as an expanding balloon
is a nutcracker crushing air;
is a blackthroated heart
of nuclear sap
forcing converts;
sparking mutations that skulk in
ancestral memory,
they are blanketed in penumbra;
boiled as a testosteroned priest
in the sacristy
explodes from his prison ruins – from small observatories
that witness
unnecessary galaxies,
reckoning a distant pulse. and
they are broadcloth
tucked in boots as fever is a noise of
little creatures under skin
genuflecting to an earth
that requires
hordes of royalty with its audible portraits of small men.
a bicycle chain snaps in snow
where ice cannot induce caution
and i remember a small itch between
shoulder
blades,
redder than a sailor’s sky
dripping like lava over
a
cliff. and suspenders scraping,
pulling a smile
from the ground
where beggars are easy prey
but evaporate in fever of bacterial voices that
sing permafrost’s shelter.
eggs of gargantua scatter like rain.
coprolites
in this most beautiful
time,
wood-free memories
are bottoming on
crumbling roads of dawn.
my fists
are unsprung
catapults
and the sky
is a
baby
that
doesn’t cry.
i wait in a tunnel, ivy grown
in bishoprics
of webs:
that spider smoke is
a lime jelly tasted with
a spoon. at my powdered foot,
a coin cracks
from acidic gravity
and lays in pieces
like a
forgotten cabin in the
woods.
downwind of
morning,
the sun’s
retinas are bleached
and the
light melts out of mind.
but nowhere is sound
a sentient being that
has to have
a language.
my bones are the furnace
my muscles once were: my
skull
is a
pacific island not yet risen,
threatening laughter.
dorsal fins do the same.
-- Livio Farallo is co-editor of Slipstream and Professor of Biology at Niagara County Community College in Sanborn, New York. His work has appeared or, is forthcoming, in The Cordite Review, The Cardiff Review, The Blotter, Roi Faineant, Poetry Salzburg Review, Misfit, Ranger, and elsewhere.