Author: Sharon Mesmer

There is chaff around my rags
and a swoon in my nodal moon.
A deep horror of petrichor
greets me daily at the bar.
I don’t go to San Diego
for burritos anymore and
Ikea’s cult-fave bookcase
sits undelivered on my porch.
A friend said there’s no code for rolling
from The Darkness to The Flood 
though we both know full well
what black be the beauty of
this last rain date in April.
Maybe I do make magic bad 
and if true I want a tattoo of that 
to rouse the piss out of this 
slow-dance/burn tune
of foopah cosplay musing.
On the other hand
my other friend said
puddles and slush
still prism the sun
to weather the scent
of wet cement 
and there are twenty-seven
as-yet-undreamt-of 
broad transcription diphthongs
left to invent.
And because of all thus
I will continue to wonder
what bright flux
might come.


(I just want to thank everyone for this month of incredible poems! Every year I’m so happy and honored to be joining in here — and maybe this year especially, with all the daily — hourly — attempted whittlings-away of our souls by the forces of freakin’ evil. I wish you all beauty and success in whatever ways they sustain you. Personally, I will have some [hopefully] really good news tomorrow. Shine your light-thoughts my way, please?? THANK YOU ALL again and again.)

Look at you
Look how you look
On that hilltop
By that meadow
Spatulating the exchange rate
With bees
Saved-up salisbury steak grease
And fried chicken gristle
From the ‘70s

Just look at you
Steve of Queens
Doompollening the lagoon 
Where the boys are
But the girls aren’t
Where shit happens in the real
And everybody’s dragging their spinning rims
Uphill for no good reason
So mouthy
A lout 
All chinos and cake
All boots on the ground
Trippin’ balls
And shit outta lunch

Join the microfiber cleaning club? Spic and/or Span a Venn Diagram? Playing the long game of compulsory sports just
to avoid dust-busting the futon is okay if we’re all poets, ‘cause the hard work of poeting is its own taut glowing
turtle mapping zone of fealty to discouragement.

Continuing to misspell “vigilance” = putting down the porn? If so, from now on I’ll need to rent my B&D equipment
from that 99 cent place in Hatley (home of Polish Narnia’s talking military coyotes). After a road trip like that, what
wouldn’t I give for some fast cheap reiki on Zoom?

Five things I would give: 1.) that cucumber-cheddar-Triscuits-mustard snack you invented; 2.) the wet garlicky
flatbread in the “discontinued” aisle by the birdseed; 3.) Henry Ford’s curtain hack; 4.) “Cap’n Crunch’s” “cock”;
5.) perfume that smells like weeping.

Are we still stalking the womb of you know whom? Or celebrating the parallel spectacles of fascism in Nazi Germany
and present-day America? Either way, I think I’ve stopped experiencing the contradictions of the swamp master
of the microfiber cleaning club, which I haven’t joined yet because of that weird loud Polish talking coyote

rustling in the underbrush. 

(with some phrases by you alls)


The verklempt wilderness
doesn’t love you back.
It just sits and spins
in beluga leviathan whorls.

You put your face to the ground,
you want to write a poem,
but its palooka voice whispers,
“You should become a plumber.”

The verklempt wilderness
reeks of fried Zippo lighter,
and stale child-self drool perfume.
It sings its own meh mindsong — loud.

It cuts a buck-and-wing sideways, 
struts off down the fork,
but before it disappears, it says,
“Never a plumber, Mr. Bungle, always just

a chud.”

Now what, Jesus?
Resurrection is hard work,
even though death is not the enemy —
the Chinese take-out menus,
car service cards and locksmith flyers
accumulating on my stoop are.
I’m too lazy to throw them away,
but I cry when I see them.
I think of your mom when I cry.
She always looked nice as the statue
I used to cry in front of,
in the church across the street
that I don’t go to anymore.
It’s a church everyone’s heard of,
but a church way past its glory,
although it might be some other church’s glory now,
maybe one that used to be a shipping container,
like a former assistant buyer in juniors’ activewear,
now making a mark in trailer home sales.
Did she pray to you for help making that change?
When I left the state to follow that lonely fixed star
shining long and low on the sanitary canal,
I was a redneck cygnet among savage drakes
fronting a Styx tribute band.
I prayed to you,
and I added some sax.
You must’ve liked that,
because when the tornado swept through the county
all the houses but mine were destroyed.
On the other hand, they haven’t hired me back
at Liquor Factory Outlet yet.
Honestly, I am not convinced you are or were
a prophet, let alone God, but when I talk to you
I sound like an oud.
Maybe that’s the miracle.

Zendaya just found Jesus’s tomb but Fergie is “missing,”
according to Middle Distance Drip State Connection,
the popular Popular Mechanics TV celebrity news show,
which operates as an extension of the celebrity website,
These Damn Rotten Kids — Always with the Problems!
I’m now watching Cher reviewing Sarah Jessica Parker’s
Adele’s Kingdom Hall Chicken Soup, a roman à clef
featuring hungry elders on boats, mysterious spores,
mandatory, structured public ministry, and a line of ants
of non-Earthly origin who drown after climbing the bowl,
told in second person from the point of view of the bowl.
“I wasn’t expecting the book to end with Zach Galifianakis,
 son of a heating oil vendor, crashing a plane into Venus,”
says Cher, “but I love how the bowl can’t say his name.
Neither can I, honestly, but that’s because I’m just lazy.”
Me, I learned the importance of saying names correctly
early on, as a member of a meat counter underclass.
It was forbidden to mix red and green peppers, but okay
to tie a bandana around a side of beef and call it a boy.
So check your privilege, Cher. Go out and find Fergie.

We did a marine ecology-themed escape room recently
for people addicted to academic associations and societies
to make their flooring projects easier. We started out clueless,
shoveling coal into tankers focused on rehoming Manhattan’s
mastodon bones. Then one nagging question arose: did we really
need a reversible jacquard comforter cover, after the tufted muted
neutral/pure organic vegetable fiber cover failed to transform everyday
bedding forever? That our hearts were so not vegan was a gyre we could
no longer ignore. But as we knelt, sighing deeply, with the palm fronds that
came with our breakfast packages (the first on the continent), we thought we
detected echoes of dawn’s whale aubades in the petrichor of the evergreen shade.

(with lines from yous)

Your zebra bicep is not worth the dopplering,
imaginary blood soup stud.
But I’m dying to know: what does it take
to be a dating columnist?
Copious meatloaf?
A lot of neuroscience conferences?
Praying you have enough blue velvet bandwidth
to find lime time soothing?
When it’s quiet I think of you whining.
That’s my mic drop.
‘Cause in Skinofmyteethville, noise verbs hard.
I wrote this on my phone and emailed it to myself
while running around screaming “Burn it all down!”
I know — I effed it up further.

Tomorrow, I’ll do better.

(a collage of some lines of you all’s, like I do every April)

This epic sprawl of largesse
In longhand

This mirror I once wondered
At

And the fire that lures
The heart that butterflies
The products in the cart

My little golden
Straddle plunder
Plotter

Asleep in silt
With the hand that holds
The hours that slow
This void of course
World without end

And then

(I wrote this during a seizure — something I’ve never done before — and then added the bit below the asterisk after it was over, and things didn’t feel so magical anymore. Then, after workshopping it with my (mainly) prose writing group, I wrote a second version. Not sure which I like better. The second version is trying to make it understandable, while the first version is trying to mimic the experience.)

Everything looks
so clean.

Even the dusty
bathroom is clean,
complete.

There’s a sheen
to each
object — not an aura;
I mean, a light
from within.

Some calm
purpose.

A happiness.

I pour tea,
pour juice,
then forget
I did it.

Then remember,
go back
to the counter and
laugh:
they’re neatly
equidistant,
the space evenly
divided by
a banana.

Drinking the tea,
drinking the juice,
looking out the window,
the pearl-gray wings
of a pigeon flash
white in sunlight
into a cornice
of the church.

Dostoyevsky was right:
I will never
let anything
break the spell
of this peace.

Ever.

***

An hour later,
the light is too bright,
everything’s a mess,
and there’s something
I should be doing.

__________________


Having a Seizure, 7am

The apartment looks
mysterious. I walk through each room
feeling complete.

The bathroom seems so clean.
There’s a sheen to each plastic travel size sunscreen,
can of dry shampoo, each nail polish bottle
on the immaculate glass shelves.
All have a history, calm purpose,
their own happiness.

I pour tea, pour juice, then forget
I did it. Then remember — go back and laugh:
the cups sit, neatly equidistant, evenly divided by
a banana.

Out the window, a pigeon’s pearl-gray wing
flashes into a cornice of the church.

Who said, I would not exchange this felicity
for all the joys that health may bring??
Dostoyevsky?
When the seizure’s over,
it’ll come to me.

*

But when it’s over: lights
too bright, glass shelves
dull with dust, headache
beginning, some oppressive thing
I should be doing.

(Yeah, I post this every April 1, yawn, but gimme a break I’m unprepared as usual … <3 )

April is a mood

A mope

It’s the moo

It’s the fucking moo

The cruelest of the most cruel months month

Stirring mixing clutching breeding bleeding branches also breeding and more breeding
always more branches clutching and breeding

Breeding tubers
And lilacs
And mopeds
Cruel mopeds
Fucking cruel mopeds neither living nor dead also snow and dead rain

How about drowning?
Yeah
How about some Earth feeding on the drowning?
Some sweaty faces in the stony places shouting and crying and we who were living
are now dying?

And the forgetful dead breeding us dry in ugly gray snow and Death undoing
with its unstoppered unguents your strange synthetic perfumes troubled confused and drowning in odours
fattening and flung into the dancery burning foaming forming more Earth and more roots and more lilacs
and dead rain

Don’t forget the dead rain, did I mention dead rain?

Even though it’s better than the fucking snow and wind the cold brutal wind that made my eye makeup run
before I discovered waterproof mascara

All of us with our roots breeding keeping us up with dead feelings and life stirring the withered stumps and canals and gashouses and whores morons and idiots a welcome indifference to whining mandolins and beneficent spiders fucking the lean solicitors and everything fucking the life out of everything so just fuckest me the fuck out hurry up please its time