HAVING IN ME
His hands are rugged enough
To make this muddied body feel beddable;
And that is the shame. Fine, I cannot
Come without minding myself a marionette
That, gagged in darkness, or — Below
the unkind shadow of (t)his Webbed
lamp — those fiercely
Bright hands: blue, pulse pink with blood.
Another address on a simmered Sunday
Ignored the warning, the burning sands
Glowing palms to prod me, to
Massage and remold me, to
Spin me senseless on a kick-wheel.
To him I am a jug, folded on all fours. Left
dripping and panting, macerated
Under the horrifying weight of a thin white sheet.
HAVING IN MANY
One of these lonely days I believe I may
awake and find that I have written an
errorless novel in full; All of life’s
sequences distilled, evaporated through
prose, I suppose. Like a carpet caked and
weighed with earth Subscribed
HAVING IN MOUNTAINS
Bring bring bring your
Unholiest ugly pointing the
dirtied nail in
the browned water, no category for the shine
or split tongue to (un)mention
the distance in rear
clear as streetfog.
Any higher and the phantasma eats the snow.
Figured you
are you, carving down my side,
these dimples of black
earth zipped under to reveal soiled runoff.
Turning just in spacetime, clean
finger-side collapses to deafening string.
I cannot help you up, for
I am taking back this peak, lifting
my black body to sun. Leaving you to
browse adjunct and aperture, in
The pitch-slope of my past-forward.
Ice shelf under the rib broken open
from hitting hard jive — there you are, sliding
Down down down mine.
Rodney Dailey II is an experimental poet from Boston. His work concerns themes of the home, diaspora, belonging, and desire. He currently lives in Iowa City, IA.