Poet: Joseph Hall, Baltimore, MD
Smalldoggies Poetry Feature #17: Joseph Hall, Baltimore, MD
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Everyone in My Home Town is Dead or Dressed Like Children
Everyone in my home town is dressed like children
The children have ash on their faces and in their hair
They wear president masks on the backs of their heads
And wave their genitals around in the sunlight
Only you sleep on a bed of tulips
Only the tulips eat meat in blackness
The children are split in half by fire
I’m sorry
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Monstercade
You are a monster in a cave
A cave is the movement of water across time
You are a monster in the movement of water across time
A monster is what you don’t desire
You are what you don’t desire
In the movement of water across time
Is a left hand, the cave forms
You first, will you form the cave
You, the movement of water across time
A monster is a glass and chromatic light turning
In the glass like insects weighted with pollen
A monster is the movement of water across time
In a pattern that wears a flower into the stone
Terror is refined honey, black honey or not honey
I want to kill myself or look here
What tumbles across the line but does not
Fall from it, these songs
You like so I make them
Rain seeping through the stone
The stone heavy with rain
When I started walking along the shore
With no clothes on and I don’t know why
The stone weeping into a stalactite
Or waxing or whatever when
One thing, over a thousand years
Become another, a lure
A Japanese baseball, a goose skeleton
New grass, green on black between the river muscles
Or a lot of soil in this room, a monster
In a cave to see the changes
Too much too fast or not at all
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The Doe Quietly Bleeds Under the Elm
I
I fired at the swans in the river, I fired
Again—the gun didn’t have any bullets and the swans
Tossed their heads and came at me screaming
Rearing out of the water. I took my gun by the barrel and
Swung it like a club—they took it
Like dust, just floating to the side, I fell
Backward, the swans hesitated over me, flexing
Their white, viperous necks before
Turning back to the water
II
You want children to emerge from your body
I want to ask god to send a sickness to abortion doctors
And make the military apparatus friendly to homosexuals
We say things and eventually we believe them
I want to hold your hand and pray to Jesus
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Punk Garden
forward maw is soft
cure, forward
stem—is darkening
green to green
hive game is flexing
you said, system—marrow bridges
cane or flute to strike broken
note beautiful monster, beautiful
trees shoulder disease
part mushroom, part vine
already, the picture frame’s lacquered
ulcerations pink pearl
like blossoms which
collect below
the eyes portrait
that framed—listen, you said
you are my enemy
if loose is lost is
expand become
fray, plane become fire
wand becomes stick
hurt—help
can you see me?
can you see me?
the garden that grows
it grows, the monster, the horseradish
the cure, the garden that grows it
grows—well, who is she
he, she is who
to me me
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It's So Cold in My House Even My Dreams Don't Move
She/I was in a place of light but not light
A place of huge receding corridors
As if a huge square bullet had been shot through the white earth
She/I went like I was walking but floated through
The light but not light she/I was ropey licked
With sweat like she/I had no clothes on
I had clothes on, there was no difference
She/I floated and the small breasts felt the air and the pubis
Felt long and she/I had an infant mouse sleeping between
The legs somehow she/I was in the mirror
And the face was lean and the musculature in decisive lines
As the arms flexed she/I was so skinny, strong
The face covered with thin horizontal cuts
There were cuts across the nose and eyelid and forehead
And the sweat from the face bisected the seams
Of coagulating blood, she/I was long naked
Not naked in the mirror and moving like walking but
Not the belly dipped below the ribs and the arms were tight
Because she/I was carrying a heavy tool, it had edges
For dividing—there was work there
Ahead in the place that was light but not light
Which was division in the hoses and tangle
The giving and taking in the pump room
In the white earth, the hand that levels
The hand that cradles a bend of hose can feel it pulse
With the passage of material through it
Do the hands know what to do? She/I looks at the hands
The tremble the slender with ends abrupt as if square
And in places scratched with the tubes and bladed tool
Warmth and condensation here we are
In the place that was light but not light
Trying to extract a third kind of genital
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Joe Hall‘s first book of poems is Pigafetta Is My Wife(Black Ocean Press 2010). His poetry and fiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, HTML Giant, Barrelhouse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Zone 3 and elsewhere.
With Wade Fletcher he co-organizes the DC-area reading series Cheryl’s Gone. His second book, The Devotional Poems, is forthcoming in 2013.
He no longer lives in a trailer park.
Visit Joe Hall's official website.