Torch Song: Modern Liquor
It’s an american movie it’s a man
it’s a woman they’re trying to talk
girl says time to disappear he shoots
her son of a bitch guy says I swore
her line was I’m the distance here
•
When I say your name it’s mine
and I claim the place where I sleep
I don’t think of gypsum or lumber
or how the hands raised the walls
when I pardon myself I don’t speak
Torch Song: Kriegspiel
I will set down my oath in flint
and fire when I guide my sickle
through a field of wheat and sink
my arrows and follow the moon
I say this is signing my name
•
Your move if I say this and press
the stone we stole from the beach
in your palm our letdown of a god
he’s failing at daylight but the rat
king is sly he’s built his nest of wool
Torch Song: Old Knife
When I find him tending asphodel
& the raw skin’s red beneath his rope
My son will you spare me a pinch of blood
he bleats & the song in his goat ears
is I sure hope you live forever pop
•
Solitaires of amethyst & peridot
I wore around my neck like two
hanged queens the winds come
to shine them the santa ana she
builds a dust bowl of my ribcage
biography
ALLYSON PATY’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Best New Poets 2012, DIAGRAM, Handsome, and elsewhere. She co-founding editor of Singing Saw Press, a fine art and poetry publisher and currently serves as editor in chief of Washington Square Review.
DANNIEL SCHOONEBEEK’s first book of poems is American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Boston Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, BOMB, Indiana Review, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Verse Daily, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere. He writes a monthly column on poetry for The American Reader, hosts the Hatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn.