Here at Black Lawrence Press we are celebrating National Poetry Month with a poem a day, featuring a total of 30 authors from our list. Today’s featured poet is Scott Alexander Jones, author of the forthcoming long poem elsewhere.
from elsewhere
That finger on your temple is the barrel
of my raygun—
That wretched dull resonance
at the end of all thingstells us nothing
we haven/t already been told
regarding nightjars—
That eyelid slit of light
beneath the bathroom door at the end of the hallway
yellow & yellowish & yellowing
as deciduous leaves
come winter
says one of us remains
awake at this androgynous hour
lighting candles meant to conjure azaleas.
Call it evening despite
our blue proximity to morning—
Blue as your tattered pea coat I always mistook for black—
Choose any definition
of blackout:
A scarlet pulsing of stoplights
or the scar in my abdomen from the failed
appendectomy of a cyclone
fence—
And if I am sleeping thru the lullabies of a summer
storm, you are screaming
an arsenal of auburn
cellos into hiding—
Your lipstick desperately flamingo.
Soundlessly agape as Civil War daguerreotypes.
We have arrived
at the scene of the film where the first bullets hail down—
All sound cuts out—
Your larynx
banished brailleward
by explosions in the sky.
Toward the more taciturn outskirts of:
anywhere but here—
The nowheres
we/ll no longer witness together—
Scouring burnt lexicons in search of the perfect word for:
murmurs of wind
caught in a vacant stairwell—
Scott Alexander Jones is the author of elsewhere (Black Lawrence Press, 2014)—the first book in his Indian Summer’s End series—as well as three chapbooks: Carpe Demons (Unsolicited Press, 2014), That Finger on Your Temple is the Barrel of My Raygun (Bedouin Books, 2014) and One Day There Will Be Nothing to Show That We Were Ever Here (Bedouin Books, 2009). He has an MFA from the University of Montana and a BA from the University of Texas. He is also the co-founder and poetry editor of the punk literary zine Zerø Ducats, and his poems have appeared in over fifty journals. Having lived in Portland, Austin, Seattle, Montana, and Wellington, New Zealand, he currently calls home a bungalow down the road from the old William S. Burroughs house in Lawrence, Kansas.