Connor Stratman
Minutes
Begin
The bits that survive me
or this winter
will also fry
and attack
our memories
which chop back at them
Those chimes outside
sing
to her neighbors
saints candles
stare back
at me, my
chest tightens
with the decided
heat
So dangerous
this table
smell this
glass and
tell me
it’s not snowing
Two
The long day is box office poison,
the door incidents grew frozen
dandelion deep into her ankles.
O the face, I went for it. I
saw the bottle shrinking and
the shrapnel tripling into gates.
The habits that stuck with heads,
bang! Corridor armors will hide
me where the blues can’t. This
is devil music, hidden candles
push twenty units by the end
of the swindling years of dread.
Born
The tree is no life,
or,
the energy channeled
through hollows
and stream
(where bicycles
clam up in
little circles)
split open
for all to
see and touch
with fur hands
where we’re
torn out
and thrown
in the ice
kept white
and silent
Break
As if nothing was worthy
of your feet, I stood still
and waited for the walls
to glue themselves back
together. They never did
and we had to do it our-
selves. What you command,
and fuck, and chill into
the hollow rings of hands,
you bring to me as dances,
plopped against a wall
for the way it waits there.
Looking forward, the coma
of dollars and jungles,
are the new ways to please
or to ask how the boxes
burn and dig into grounds
where the chaplains beg.
Charge
After the storm, they went on their way. A bright sun eclipsed the fragments of ice on the windows, shrubs scrapped onto the alleys, backgrounds of dirt tripped on brick. Ten to two and the street clears. The morning denies the charge. The plump smoke of my breath crawls off the coats, Sheridan Road defecting into new skies, new planes of sound. A splash to cover up the creaks of the lake.
Listen and I’ll tell you a story.
Listen and you’ll hear the silence of growing trees.
Call him. You’ll see. Your voice bleeds like oils of incantation. This fable is the thread of the violation, the call of the carrions. If you don’t see it now, it will appear. The shroud of your mumbles will grow to clangs of the past.
Heart
In these: postures
minutes all the bald covers
trim as
film Little
and big
the sadness curves
to my body
clicking the locks
and swerving
into the wake
of the white wreck
The water carried
me to you and yet
I kept floating the sun
caught you
pulled your hair
doves and carrions
clasped
to the hanged
shirts
on the coast
No I won’t force this
portrait
of me watching
you (standing
on you) I am not there
this time
Please
In time, we were afraid of cities,
of diluted dates torn off hinges,
ceilings that collapsed as faults.
What do you see? Samples
of catastrophe, collision and
fogs. Stirs out memory, hills
where the dog army surges.
On the hill, you feel tired
as the sage birds turn their
heads and stare eyeless
at the larger mountain.
The show attacks, voices
from the mountain spit
and the globs mount
into the carpets of our
room. White shadows,
this is real only when
your lips curl to the door.
Rise
Coming home at all moments. The ice retreats.
A flicker of local lights, lost along the shoreline.
Say that it’s like a pillow. Your head rises.
Shine
On his back, a sin, a uniform,
tricyclic contusions and rapid
shifts of his eyes. His marker,
it seems, is the edge of the gurney,
a journey into the amazons
of touch. His hands, drunk
with sex and paper, crawl
onto the pedestal and rise
towards the lightning, his
cramped lake space postures
in the likeness of a goat.
This staring shine, this
encomium of nightfall,
is but a native of these
parts. You won’t see
this ice fall on the other
side of the building, you
won’t find the measures
so precise.
Connor Stratman is the author of four collections of poetry, Volcano (Writing Knights, 2011), Some Were Awake (plumberries press, 2011), An Early Scratch (erbacce press, 2011), and Invisible Entrances (erbacce press, 2010). He is the editor of the poetry journal The Balloon and currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.
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Minutes
Begin
The bits that survive me
or this winter
will also fry
and attack
our memories
which chop back at them
Those chimes outside
sing
to her neighbors
saints candles
stare back
at me, my
chest tightens
with the decided
heat
So dangerous
this table
smell this
glass and
tell me
it’s not snowing
Two
The long day is box office poison,
the door incidents grew frozen
dandelion deep into her ankles.
O the face, I went for it. I
saw the bottle shrinking and
the shrapnel tripling into gates.
The habits that stuck with heads,
bang! Corridor armors will hide
me where the blues can’t. This
is devil music, hidden candles
push twenty units by the end
of the swindling years of dread.
Born
The tree is no life,
or,
the energy channeled
through hollows
and stream
(where bicycles
clam up in
little circles)
split open
for all to
see and touch
with fur hands
where we’re
torn out
and thrown
in the ice
kept white
and silent
Break
As if nothing was worthy
of your feet, I stood still
and waited for the walls
to glue themselves back
together. They never did
and we had to do it our-
selves. What you command,
and fuck, and chill into
the hollow rings of hands,
you bring to me as dances,
plopped against a wall
for the way it waits there.
Looking forward, the coma
of dollars and jungles,
are the new ways to please
or to ask how the boxes
burn and dig into grounds
where the chaplains beg.
Charge
After the storm, they went on their way. A bright sun eclipsed the fragments of ice on the windows, shrubs scrapped onto the alleys, backgrounds of dirt tripped on brick. Ten to two and the street clears. The morning denies the charge. The plump smoke of my breath crawls off the coats, Sheridan Road defecting into new skies, new planes of sound. A splash to cover up the creaks of the lake.
Listen and I’ll tell you a story.
Listen and you’ll hear the silence of growing trees.
Call him. You’ll see. Your voice bleeds like oils of incantation. This fable is the thread of the violation, the call of the carrions. If you don’t see it now, it will appear. The shroud of your mumbles will grow to clangs of the past.
Heart
In these: postures
minutes all the bald covers
trim as
film Little
and big
the sadness curves
to my body
clicking the locks
and swerving
into the wake
of the white wreck
The water carried
me to you and yet
I kept floating the sun
caught you
pulled your hair
doves and carrions
clasped
to the hanged
shirts
on the coast
No I won’t force this
portrait
of me watching
you (standing
on you) I am not there
this time
Please
In time, we were afraid of cities,
of diluted dates torn off hinges,
ceilings that collapsed as faults.
What do you see? Samples
of catastrophe, collision and
fogs. Stirs out memory, hills
where the dog army surges.
On the hill, you feel tired
as the sage birds turn their
heads and stare eyeless
at the larger mountain.
The show attacks, voices
from the mountain spit
and the globs mount
into the carpets of our
room. White shadows,
this is real only when
your lips curl to the door.
Rise
Coming home at all moments. The ice retreats.
A flicker of local lights, lost along the shoreline.
Say that it’s like a pillow. Your head rises.
Shine
On his back, a sin, a uniform,
tricyclic contusions and rapid
shifts of his eyes. His marker,
it seems, is the edge of the gurney,
a journey into the amazons
of touch. His hands, drunk
with sex and paper, crawl
onto the pedestal and rise
towards the lightning, his
cramped lake space postures
in the likeness of a goat.
This staring shine, this
encomium of nightfall,
is but a native of these
parts. You won’t see
this ice fall on the other
side of the building, you
won’t find the measures
so precise.
Connor Stratman is the author of four collections of poetry, Volcano (Writing Knights, 2011), Some Were Awake (plumberries press, 2011), An Early Scratch (erbacce press, 2011), and Invisible Entrances (erbacce press, 2010). He is the editor of the poetry journal The Balloon and currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.
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