[untitled 327]
BY ASHLEY PORRAS
When I say endless,
what I mean is mist
hovering over the asphalt column of
New England, blue
abalone and wampum. Faded
cedar shingles.
The tonna shell becoming purgatory.
Cape Cod in Fibonacci.
Here the waves
open and close
like an apology, some kind
of contritious monster
—Asterion, the lonely
Minotaur chasing her
friends. And laying there
—driftwood half-floured
underneath the ocean’s
final membrane, heaving
slightly, having destroyed
itself in place of seeing
itself destroyed:
these enclosures,
these imploded thoughts
of intention.
These trees, every pair
bodies
holding up
scenes of this
endless film.
[untitled 312]
BY ASHLEY PORRAS
Dusk, and it is a waste
A waste these dimmed fuchsia auroras
A waste these muted cries for the cable wires,
slumped like silent nooses
I no longer see the street as a tress but as a canal
carved from a bullet: distinctly precious,
our long violent paths to indifference
Our matutinal suburbs, distinguishing themselves
into broken pits of battery acid. This is what I tell
myself, when I can bear to look to see
A jet again
It’s suicide exhaust wasting imprinting the sky
The twilight, this inescapable night which, for now,
is lambent and young and unforgiving
–here you are again
in your banged delusions,
your mad feasts of yourself,
in all your twisted newness.
Who will love us in this poverty?
