—for Nicolas Pesqués
but translation leaves them open
to interpretation, like countryside images
taken from a speeding train
the reflection of the photographer's hand
out-of-focus and overlaid upon green
fields or lifeless winter branches.
Elevators aren't necessarily gallows
but Parisians die within them daily
as they wait for grappling hooks to fall
from the railing of a diplomat's balcony.
A woman's platinum blonde hair
wanders rain soaked streets
in search of her absent lover
and the trumpet tones of Miles Davis
unaware that a stranger's death
means the death of ourselves: some trick of fate
the gods, long since dead, left in place
for us to feel the force of their absence.
Our only escape is to write a hill
yellowed beyond translation.
—after AWP 2012
1.
Birds of bones
perched in ghost
trees sing
in my mouth
2.
Flowers on the farm
bloom into animals
riddled with moonlight.
3.
Across bedroom oceans
dreams ebb and flow
on pillow tides.
4.
My invisible lungs
breathe solid
atmosphere, filling
my body with concrete.
Joshua Ware lives in Denver, CO. His first book, Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley, won the 2010 Furniture Press Poetry Prize and was published in 2011. He is the author of several chapbooks, three of which will be released in 2012: Imaginary Portraits (Greying Ghost Press); How We Remake the World, co-written with Trey Moody and winner of the first annual Slope Editions Chapbook Prize; and SDVIG (alice blue books), co-written with Natasha Kessler. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Hobart, The Journal, ILK, Nano Fiction, and Third Coast.