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Trim Roses, Mary

Dust and spirit

in the cavernous eyes

of our dead cat

help to immanentize the eschaton

toward a fruit-based strangeness

with the head of a girl

with the snake of a body

at the Erie County Fair

in the Synod of Dort

find a solitude,

near the chessmen and the tax returns

where the lammas dream

in a luxury gay space communism

find a dead wood’s postcolonial guerilla exegesis

in the mobs of vindicators

find the root fallacy

of the music that can carry it

and for “weird but true”

read “the world tree”

read the crows of Boulder,

read the magpies of London,

read archaic tribal garbage or an original Christology

and then Jack, and then Bobbie,

and then Jeffrey’s bridge,

and then Corbett’s ashes,

in the funerals, dentists, divorces,

In the brain masala and bhima astrologers

be a brilliant heliotrope in a flannel waffle hemp

read the welfare queen’s strawberry unicorn cakes her bare buick rusting

no Ding Dongs,

no Sea Gods,

and more Toms outbound.

from A Princess Magic Presto SpellFind more by Lisa Jarnot at the library

Copyright © Lisa Jarnot
Used with the permission of Flood Editions.

Published in Lisa Jarnot Poems

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, a State-based program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this (publication, website, exhibit, etc.) do not necessarily represent those of the Idaho Humanities Council or the National Endowment for the Humanities.