Three Poems by Damon Hubbs

 

Broken Crown

 

Dead as a doornail pushing up daisies

oh whence the wichity-

wichity of Bachman’s warbler,

and how I became the giant jewel beetle (Julodimorpha bakewelli)

fucking a beer bottle on the side of the road

thinking it the most beautiful

shiny brown elytra covered in dimples,

how I dried up in the sun

like a fossil sucked from stones

hooroosh

oh whence the earth

in perfect mimicry of our glut

like the knight and armoured snail

melting away into slime.

 

Melting, away into slime like the glaciers.

Engineering undone —frissons and fissures

slide, slag heap, and I watch the iceberg’s

gray margin wobble in the Amundsen Sea

like a pyramid hemorrhaging a grand gallery—

genera, families, orders. O slippage

there is nothing left to fetch. I am orphaned

to lice and wreckage. I am penned

with skin lesions. I am mined

for the sickstore

soured

culled to feed

in sleep masks

with a roar like a grenade tipped harpoon.

 

With a roar like a grenade tipped harpoon

Romeo and Juliet fight

daybreak and the plastic moon;

a lark or nightingale, songbirds

trapped on gum-covered lime sticks,

flyway slaughter is our house making.

In mine I collect plastic,

I host plastic. It rises like sonar

sarcoma. My son, made of plastic.

My daughter drunk on plastic.

Our tabernacle hinged with star bolt

bio-solids. On Sundays

we stunt the growth of earthworms

and watch budburst scream in the streetlights.

 

I am budburst screaming in the streetlights.

I am the insect

trapped in clouds of Deccan volcanism.

I am deposited—

my broken crown

tumbling down vascular mazes

dead as a doornail pushing up daisies.

 

microplastics DUPLEX

 

I twitten the trab of tiny hedges  

between blood, brains, lungs & beyond. 

 

Green deserts beyond the blood, betwixt

furrows of your gut I harrow plastic teeth. 

 

On hands & knees in your furrowing gut 

I’m carried like a cloud of plastic weather.  

 

Clouds of plastic weather lodged organ pink

in the ocean’s circular current. 

 

In the ocean’s circular current 

my home is a state of permanent flood.

 

Flooded with feedstocks of lymphoma,

fenceline communities are neurotoxic.

 

Unfenced like a teaspoon of toxic dark dust,

I twitten the trab of tiny hedges.

 

fledgling DUPLEX

 

The Westfjords weren’t yellowed with lice and   

feeding tubes. My wife was fluttering pregnant.  

 

         My wife was fluttering pregnant, and Planet 

         Earth greeted us at the hotel buffet.

 

The voice of planet earth greeted us

with turtle eggs rotting in flood water. 

 

         You turtled your way through tectonic plates 

         blockchained in glacial rivers and mantle plumes.

 

Attenborough’s voice is a glacial river

jabbly with canaries and hammers.

 

         Your first kick was a jabbly hammer

         or a cascade of wild salmon, and us

 

like pufflings cascading wildly off a cliff,    

a fledgling fear emerging from our mouths.

Damon Hubbs writes poems about Thulsa Doom, Italo disco & girls who cry at airports. He's the author of three chapbooks (most recently Charm of Difference, from Back Room Poetry). Recent work appears/is forthcoming in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Red Ogre Review, Broken Antler, Dreich, Voidspace, Riggwelter Press, & elsewhere. twitter @damon_hubbs