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Flower Conroy

Shipwreck City, USA

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Gangs & banging arcades. Underbelly
exposed as bone in broad daylight.
This isthmus hour. You ease against

the Beef Barn's dank wall
where upside-down question-mark
hooks dangle. Ghost-ocean

floor. Loosen your tourniquet
noose. Chemical grenades
go off jet- & flotsam in your brain.

Rain-sensation beetles your veins.
In its wake, fiberglass & neon. Ferris
Wheel, sun warped boardwalk.

You light a cigarette. The pinball
world sizzles orange & hot green.
Nekton nonthoughts flood you.

Is it aesthetically okay to treat suffering
in so lovely & artful a way?
asks
a fan's rusted propeller blades.

Somewhere in the heat: traffic. Maroon
blister where blood has crisped.
The ship inside the bottle

of the syringe, capsizing.
And you, the good captain
standing there, drowning.


Rapture Watch

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Black out, a sack wrangled over the turned
away head. Next the crystal vase temperature
dropped & a whistling seethed thru the streets' &
trees' citron teeth. I was snow-blinded—the

darkness utterly (as in, it seemed to speak) of darker
deprivation—then the end of an eclipse.
Had I not been paying attention not
only would I have missed it, but I would've missed

missing it. Had I not been left behind, had
I not not slept or woke. I swore a mountain
range once obstructed this view, & now scud; sink-
holes where tunnels burrowed, confusion

in the gardens. Is the landscape its own creature?
When faced with chaos the brain attempts
to quarantine the chaos: the hypothermic strips,
then folds away his clothes; the touched by

an angel speaks in tongues, writhes like snake. I
name the absences yesterday. While Everest surrenders
to itself, the light from outer space finds its way
thru, but more oft than not, it's already dead.


Dear Weaver

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Murmuring from room to unraveling room, a boat
arrows into the narrow empty beyond the shallows.
I'm chilled to be part of this ending
where the ocean splays & is splaying, a placebo
of broken jewelry the Vitruvian clouds expose
themselves to. The trick is to see what is
not there, aperture capturing certain faraway
stars whom no longer exist & yet radiate photon, tentacle
out to us. Or how your bereft hands
motion, a subtle weave though you've long ago abandoned
your loom. Its absence exactly where you left
it. Now a moon hatches across your brow, loons flood
from your eyes, feathers & small platoons of navigating
light you study the warp & weft of.


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