Housemouth (and other poems)By Anhvu Buchanan and Brent Piller
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Housemouth
Sometimes a bird with bad wings and other times I can’t leave the house. I invented a mouth just like this: wide as a cliff and obsessed with pianos. I architect my appetite to simply pink salt and poetry. This is what life does: it kills you or wraps you in lemons. It drinks bodies clean. Bones and marrow followed by ampersands. Something is coming. I've forgotten its name but its face blankets and tears. Hives swarmed and lonely. There is only home if that. A postcard bolded by spring. Feathers stopped growing and everything is swallowed whole by the fog of the kitchen windows. Remember the grass is always greener when watching from a collapsing porch. And again it goes like this: no more rooms left to dust your heart and you waiting for the worn hands of night to come, right within bite’s reach.
What Melts Is What You Carry
Nothing is forgotten until it melts into a puddle. Every new cloud is another penguin wishing for flight. Ice melts even in the winter. The water level’s rising by the minute and all the wing factories have been abandoned. What cannot fly will turn to dust. In this life we whisper migration. The beauty of a parade is that numbers never die. What better way to move than through a flock of hands and dreams and hearts all blurred in one. Where do you end and you begin? What doesn't melt will burn sorrow into your pocket. Monotony keeps the lights on. Monogamy asks, lightning bugs or night terrors? Night asks, life vests or hula hoops? I ask, you or you?
The Secret Lives of 2 AM
At night I lay down my gospels gently beside me. My bed and my mind haunt me, in that order. Night bleeds into more night and I stare at evening’s walls. There is a dialogue between the parts of my body keeping me up. Eyes try to lullaby but worry sings the nightingale’s song. Faith departs my belly and eventually thoughts swallow me whole. When I finally sleep I dream the Red Sea parts but everyone forgets how to walk so all the fish die for nothing. My hands awake and remember to look for the morning. My back is an endless desert filled with cacti in the shape of saints. Dear bed, who prays for me? Can we find comfort in bread and wine one more time?
Hindsight Is a Long Distance Runner
When the stars turned their backs on us we decided to find another way. Sacrificed sleep to the sky. We lived through telephone wires and whispered postcard talk. Two tin cans tied together by string: this is how I found you. Can we push time face down in the dirt again? Travel back to the first of our firsts. I’m charmed by the charm of your accent holding me tightly in its arms. And every morning my mouth caves in to seal in our memories of last night’s last night. Can we push time face down in the dirt again? Fate saws through our chest through our bones. You left me pieces of your teeth and told me to stare at the sun until it turns into your eyes. There aren’t enough surprises waiting at the door. There aren’t enough ways to turn vacation into four more seasons. Can we pull time up from the dirt and let it breathe? With each passing day we collect more and more miles until we can build that front door that picket fence that front porch call it together again.
Sometimes a bird with bad wings and other times I can’t leave the house. I invented a mouth just like this: wide as a cliff and obsessed with pianos. I architect my appetite to simply pink salt and poetry. This is what life does: it kills you or wraps you in lemons. It drinks bodies clean. Bones and marrow followed by ampersands. Something is coming. I've forgotten its name but its face blankets and tears. Hives swarmed and lonely. There is only home if that. A postcard bolded by spring. Feathers stopped growing and everything is swallowed whole by the fog of the kitchen windows. Remember the grass is always greener when watching from a collapsing porch. And again it goes like this: no more rooms left to dust your heart and you waiting for the worn hands of night to come, right within bite’s reach.
What Melts Is What You Carry
Nothing is forgotten until it melts into a puddle. Every new cloud is another penguin wishing for flight. Ice melts even in the winter. The water level’s rising by the minute and all the wing factories have been abandoned. What cannot fly will turn to dust. In this life we whisper migration. The beauty of a parade is that numbers never die. What better way to move than through a flock of hands and dreams and hearts all blurred in one. Where do you end and you begin? What doesn't melt will burn sorrow into your pocket. Monotony keeps the lights on. Monogamy asks, lightning bugs or night terrors? Night asks, life vests or hula hoops? I ask, you or you?
The Secret Lives of 2 AM
At night I lay down my gospels gently beside me. My bed and my mind haunt me, in that order. Night bleeds into more night and I stare at evening’s walls. There is a dialogue between the parts of my body keeping me up. Eyes try to lullaby but worry sings the nightingale’s song. Faith departs my belly and eventually thoughts swallow me whole. When I finally sleep I dream the Red Sea parts but everyone forgets how to walk so all the fish die for nothing. My hands awake and remember to look for the morning. My back is an endless desert filled with cacti in the shape of saints. Dear bed, who prays for me? Can we find comfort in bread and wine one more time?
Hindsight Is a Long Distance Runner
When the stars turned their backs on us we decided to find another way. Sacrificed sleep to the sky. We lived through telephone wires and whispered postcard talk. Two tin cans tied together by string: this is how I found you. Can we push time face down in the dirt again? Travel back to the first of our firsts. I’m charmed by the charm of your accent holding me tightly in its arms. And every morning my mouth caves in to seal in our memories of last night’s last night. Can we push time face down in the dirt again? Fate saws through our chest through our bones. You left me pieces of your teeth and told me to stare at the sun until it turns into your eyes. There aren’t enough surprises waiting at the door. There aren’t enough ways to turn vacation into four more seasons. Can we pull time up from the dirt and let it breathe? With each passing day we collect more and more miles until we can build that front door that picket fence that front porch call it together again.
Anhvu Buchanan is the author of The Disordered (sunnyoutside press) and Backhanded Compliments & Other Ways to Say I Love You (Works on Paper Press ) and Which Way To Go or Here (Platypus Press, 2016) co-written with Brent Piller. He currently teaches in Berkeley and can be found online at www.anhvubuchanan.com.
Brent Piller is the co-author (along with Anhvu Buchanan) of the mini-chapbook Which Way to Go or Here (Platypus Press, 2016). His poems have appeared recently in or forthcoming in (b)OINK, Gramma, Wildness, Reservoir, and Yellow Chair Review. He can be reached at [email protected].