Five Poems by Stephen Guy Mallett

 

Acinetos and Syncrasis

 

Petrichorlessly she says she read milk

cartons costs twenty bucks in Yellowknife,

this colour is named carnation, a colour named

for the persimmon sliced on our plates,

here the poplar roots, here is an upperware

housing salmon rose

petals, dart filters poke through spring snow first, we measure his age

in the growth of incisors.

Reedmace rhizomes thaw. How do I substitute a need for revelation

via augury with a passage from the psalms, the urge to scream?

The passage inked

above his ribs when they check his catheter

reads like a stock-cut key on marina gravel.

 

 

After Hui Ti Xiu and the Practice of Drawing Weeds

 

Ineluctably dug

the worms up

from their home,

collected in their writhing

by the bucket, the only time

I’ve heard father yell, when

he pulled up the road to view the mass

of worms on asphalt, I guess the molar

weight of all snacks like some ad I’d skip,

Marganitha opened, oblation, a flat circle,

do my gums bleed when Russia invades

Ukraine or should I only floss

when she marks Fomalhaut

on a September night? 

 

 

Plank Length

 

Charbagh from the loops 

of any acorn, light through 

desert glass, all possible

worlds flown at half mast. 

I was cosmogony: 

if russet(s) sprout(s) 

new limbs in the dark.

 

 

Theurgeis

 

Bracts at the base of blades of grass

Glumes bloom patina-blue-streaks brass

Avocado by equator; nectarine at aphelion—

Trace fibrous roots branching Procyon 

And divide all by one and back

As if wormwood was, and is,

If Bashō is the dreamer of the dream we're in 

Run the asexual nub of a tongue over it—

Then the covers where they bare 

Their single threaded veins: theurgeis where 

All battles began and did begin

And begun to burn.

 

 

The Loci of Fluid Points

 

Spider(s) nest(s) at the nexus

of lintel and mean

eye-level, I picture Túna

rolling over linoleum

horizons there, the laundry

steam issuing smells

better than this calendar

year's dessert, mind

the asterisk of a doorknob,

betray me to Thingol.

Stephen Guy Mallett was born in MD, lives in QC, and his volumes of poems include Disparate Logoi, forthcoming from ABP, and Markov Chainmail, forthcoming from Cactus Press. He holds philosophy and literature from Concordia University, manuscripts for Atticus Review, and poetry for Sepia Quarterly.