Keith Higginbotham



Three Walls

Quit the paper, a parable of
gender swipes. Hair a backdrop of

tiny orange expanse. We cranked
a wordsmith from behind.

An elaborate robotic moment can
articulate a silly innocence

anytime, collected in the back.
Reverie an homage to a giant

whizzing sound, palette of the deadpan
antique shroud minus the chain-link sun.


I Could Have Loved You

Marginalia

this hell—a balmy buckskin-brown house
out in the objections

read: raft-building, underlined in pencil
wedding the drums like a born-again road

over the great forties an abbreviated memoir
from this affect we have to extract context

while artificial hand-speed changes the political,
changes movement from chaos to precursor—

direct primitive invariants found in the tapping
yard, the mind’s infinite characters

on artistic grounds, a mouth of antidote
surrounds the stamina of critical nodes

buckshot, be chosen, and hand off the criteria
to gaze upon this bleached middle age

topography, shimmering up a model beyond
and yet, dislodge the fever of ordained rinse

is the only figure, smuggling, cunning random
watching world of fray, a short trap

hence the boom of habit was the official
willful trawl, an ice-white lament of wrong place


Manifest Destiny

Limitations

What we’re holding on
to is holding us
back: carbon house, home
on the radio, orchestral
through

this terminology of appliance
wealth.

Add mutual replicate and show
the play, too little, if a
negative lab to denote
a common
depiction of working
is problematic.

And so the future
warms, countenance
a mere practice of motif
in reducing; annoy the twain.

Recite the randomized
approach,
Son of Label: This is
the era of
birth order, flax,
and taboo.



Keith Higginbotham is a poet and visual artist whose work has recently appeared in Bending Light into Verse, the bleed, Moria, and Stone Highway Review. He is the author of Calibration (Argotist Ebooks, 2011), Theme From Next Date (Ten Pages Press, 2011), Prosaic Suburban Commercial (Eratio Editions, 2010), and Carrying the Air on a Stick (The Runaway Spoon Press, 1995). He lives in Columbia, SC.
 
 
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