The game of erasing yelling
By Scott Ferry
It started one night, the 10,000th night of fighting,
M and I began to soften the ribs of the clock,
to allow miscounts, delays, skipped clicks of the fingers.
Once we learned of the missing seconds, we stole them,
placed them between us like taffeta and cream.
Slow became the words of each anger spit
below us in the living room. We stepped
into the silences like slipping feet into giant clams. And
it did not matter what the parents howled,
but that we could keep the salmon-jumps
and the hiccup-beats as our own was precious.
And M said, un-speaking, that we should make jello
and rejoice for pineapple! And I un-replied that the merepeople
nap backwards. She agreed! Profoundly! The game was not a shield
because metal corrodes with bile. The game grew
like invisible holes with tubes, and piano and soft cinders in the stillness.
We looked at each other and knew we had flown under the streets together
whole, but as vapor.
Cleptosoul and the sinister itch
By Scott Ferry
Crazy Horse never allowed cameras to set his spirit in silver chloride,
neither do we. If we exist to you, we breathe greed and close
up on light with a halo trigger. What is important is you don’t know your own history
except what is in those images, and images can be rearranged, torn and bent.
Do you think you are in debt for your benefit or for ours? We have made you
believe that money provides life, sanity, rational family meatloaf.
If we control the imaginary numbers behind your income, we grip
you by your elements: your phosphorous is ours, your calcium,
your hemoglobin, your eggs and semen, and those of your
unborn children are bought already. Watch the news, we comfort you with
intestines blown apart with gold— shimmer/sinner. You have voted
for us, wrote 2 am college essays on us, cried for our ilk when
we die on the brittle collarbones of billions of laboring animals.
You cheer for us when you think you elect us.
I cannot say I feel sorry for all of you, it is unfair
to think of you as people. Why am I trying to warn you? The sky is littered with
veins pulsing like priapisms. The patterns you wear into your floors, your tongues,
have been plagiarized. But you don’t know you still have a spirit. Crazy Horse
knew as the Army shoved treaties in his electron field, damaging the threads
of Oglala girls’ hair, hollowing their songs which welcome the hunters
back to the womb. Jesus knew about the money lenders. He took a photograph
from the crucifix of 10 men wearing the cakeblood of the trillion blind virgins
on their eyes. Remember to remember. Which camera are you
holding?
I want a misspelled tattoo on my face
By Scott Ferry
Mayhim where my mustache grows in so I can conceal it when I go on interviews. I am all about ripping this place up! … on my own terms.
Or Glyphosate, the chemical name for Roundup. I don’t even need to misspell it,
because nobody knows what it is. It is an important word because it will kill all of the bees. That’s power. I want power on my forehead.
Hegamony will glow in red on my right cheek. Yes. I am part of the white elite rich who control the world! But I can’t spell it.
Gasiline carved into the valley of my maxilla with Sioux blood.
Freedumb. On my clavicle so it will vibrate my withering soul as it is drilled into me.
Can I get my bones tattooed, my lungs, my myelin sheaths (look I spelled it right)? I want people to know that I am asleep. I want the television to be assured that I am sprouting tainted words by proxy, by rote.
I am the cancer vocabulary.
Try to wash me out of your skin.
How to cross eyelid bridge
By Scott Ferry
It’s not for us to decide
but we cannot wake the godbody.
She has been asleep for 50 million seconds
and the others have quite taken over the skinfield.
There has been killing, as the streptococci demand
a homeland in the lacrimal caruncle and the neutrophils
pour over them like boiling oil. The words have been taught
and retaught as to why the pupil rolls under the lids
and never shows Itself. Still others teach that there is nothing
behind the iris but the dark hole and that this darkness is the truth.
Still others climb the lashes gripping the trunks and sliding to the edge
of the opening, near gravity’s end where the architecture will be created
by the seeing of the images. Many fall and soak their wings in the sodium jets.
We must be alive because we decide to not search for the meanings
behind why we seem asleep, staring at a closed eye, waiting for a death which portends
a reward, a promise. We decide to colonize between the kerantinocytes, to create children
in the dim light, to illuminate our own names from under the words
which spill from the ether like demonic echo-foam.
Talking to the grey woman behind the steeple
By Scott Ferry
They think I am in Sunday school, but I sneak
behind the ivy bricks where the webs catch the clock,
where sometimes I dig under the foundation, dislodge old cement
try to find coins hidden by other kids ditching church fifty, one-hundred fifty years
past. I feel someone looking at me, I stitch my eyes up with a heartcord,
search the vines crawling up the esophagus of the steeple, sniff the Bakersfield
wind, touch the bone-dust with my nails. I think it is a woman who bends down
to spell names in Spanish to me, sheer silence under sheer morning sunslant.
And I can see her Sunday dress to her ankles, can smell gardenias, can hold the sadness
in my teeth. I don’t know what she has lost, just that she is waiting, retracing
what was to be said, when the train would leave, how the man was to be avoided.
Silencio, she sobs, misericordia, mi amor.
Scott Ferry works to make Veterans whole again as a RN, carries his four year old daughter on his head daily, and attempts to be handsome enough for his gorgeous wife. He has studied English, Acupuncture, Education, Nursing, and has determined that history is the most perverse fiction money can buy.
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