Diagrammatic

The sun rips through the cornfield dust 
and the house folds 
in yellow gasps 
the cellar door boiled alive      and the turgid moment 
melts         I’m gone   
from modelled to marred    in the living      room   among green ferns 
leaking over the sanitized kitchen 
windows burst outward
many with the gurgling wash      the corroding eyelet

Cellar gunk evaporates to transfer points    mine to yours throughout 
the fuming field         a mossy haze stitching limbs to motion 
capable of nurturing the germy heft 

Don’t let me be out among strangers a 
siloed databank of mulch
walking reliquary feigning stable
state of peace 
and don’t let me be fending the sun the graze the pull
of murmuring streets there is pleasure in the breakdown 

so textured so shaken so out of my sight 

Humming down the greenway 
veering loose from tunnel optics    (a bleached hallway tamped in stasis) 
self-forgiveness a sudden shift in direction   homegrown
codes hacked by hands invited in 
no angels but veiny clusters of traffic 
the day surrounded     surrendered 
rent loose      I 
am logged with sweatwork 
and bound cells (plant, animal) overflow 
the rut of naming 

Let me be    run ragged
run up     down      against  the searing day
and the barreling rush of strange fruit 
so different than my cloistered
life of cups 
balanced and arranged       filled and forgotten 

Pain proves numbness 
a dirty trick corpse sleight a cramped vessel 
will cycle back to the red cause of its cowering    eventually     lodged 
in the cornbound home
not the sun which rips but the body’s own friction against what it will not say— 

these bindings bring me comfort  

but I’m hooked out of static  
a swift angle breaks its leash from the field 
and I’m off in its gouty wake 
schematics bled clear    vanished in the flood 

PHIL SPOTSWOOD

Phil Spotswood is a poet from Alabama. His most recent work can be found in Screen Door Review, Always Crashing, and Dreginald. You can find more of his work at https://www.philspotswood.com.