PHOTO GRAPH PAPER: AMERICAN PUSH Jenny Gropp

I want everything to be frozen like a hive, spun like an ice cello
hung and whirled round in the thick drop-down of winter.

Off like the porch light, people standing grouped in the dark,
shoulders rounded like couch corners. I give you all the trees in my
heart, the will of children who curl like waves to lift a shell. Who
lift dead fish for the same reason. The breakdown! Smiles on a face,
outlines of a barnacle sucked to the pier. The feeling in the body
isn't the same as the tradition of the curve. Hate the consonants of
salt in the sea, of your skin, how wood doesn't burn like vowels. How
people burn fat, let it sing deeply through the fire: a hand across
the side of a whale: no place to hold: out of the black water onto the
blacker rocks the blackest seals make not a clatter.

A barrel of possessions: only a barrel shape. Like putting lies,
cheats and steals in the bouquet of a square.

On the street by the beach, a favorite photograph. A field made of
corn arrows up from the ground hand.

Hours, a January whale steaming on the beach.

The owned birds, chalices of light mounted in glass cases high above
the ground. Soft electric puppets, once lit by flame in Paris,
razorless like skin and sky. The gift of ever-sight. The gift of
shapes.

Raoul and David on the wall. I'm tired of thinking of Africa.
Bubble-wrapped bombs.

Eye pincushion, I know only this: for the sake of the old rocking
chair dimmed by dust in the garage, breastless – humans are nothing
like vegetables. And if god is machine, then god is machines. We come
with no vitamins. There is only intake of B and its powers.

If the bird is stealing tossed bread: the stars may be pushed together
in a zipper across the night jacket –

And the eastbound train makes long, bitter friends with the yellow
fiberglass houses, with the yards of rusted cargrass, a wizard's hat,
then with the colonial homes like buoys lit up in December snow, then
America gives its passengers back to the Atlantic, a teenager for a
moment, the train makes the ground a sea, counts the ways to where it
is by stars –

My horse, they taught me in school, is in the sky. Not in the
nightspray of dark cattle across the snow-domed plains,

Ghosts in the tails, swish, swish.