Rings spark
in the high-five
of love.
The slap & sting.
Here's a
deal: I'll be
here, heart
beating & after
the end we'll
surrender.
The stop sign
makes stops, starts.
Wire becomes
serpent when
it sparks. To speak,
exhale. It exits.
To exist,
be a serpent
coiled, not curled.
To strike,
bite the outlet
with a bright
face of teeth.
To talk. A tree.
All hanging
is wall hanging.
The wall drops
the roof.
Dan Rosenberg's first book, The Crushing Organ, won the 2011 American Poetry Journal Book Prize and is forthcoming from Dream Horse Press. Recent poems have appeared in several magazines, including American Letters & Commentary, Unstuck, and Gulf Coast. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is co-editor at Transom, the online journal of poetry and translation, and a Ph.D. student at UGA in Athens, GA.