Phillip Guston, Open Window II, 1969
Keeper
Subway towards the future, I let the ornithologist in.
He flips for a dollar–you can pay with Klarna.
Callousness appears normal in the presence of white light / white heat.
Fulton, Clinton Washington, Hoyt Schermerhorn, Jay St., York St.
I imagined the lost futures of Mr. Schermerhorn.
You made friends with a man in an Eagles jersey.
“This is our year,” he said.
“Who is miss Oryar?”
Does she have a subway stop?
For her to have a stop, the planet must shed its third layer.
There are at least N+1 pages at the Brooklyn Book Fair
Where N is the ratio of tote-bags to lovers.
And you are the constant.
At the Mira hotel, the world met the pegasus.
Father finds meaning verbalizing a handshake.
Father put my hands in your life.
Father knows it’s too late.
A global chain of intangible failures suffers to produce
this moment. There is nothing else for us anymore.
For there to be something else, the planet must shed its fourth layer.
Massive Ornery Air Blimp
Growing increasingly despondent about
the true state of all things,
I walked to the shore with a glass
Of third wave, Ethiopian-grown
coffee purchased on my
iPhone as the breeze revealed
my ability to ignore
global systems of destruction.
In lieu of hope,
tracing the trajectories of
birds from
Uzbekistan to the Deep State,
I notice incongruities
In the black-box logs.
We walk home as
a black car somersaults
to its prone position.
Lockstep, after the play,
you say “we never had
Practice.” I ask,
“where was the
rehearsal?”
Weapons of mass destruction
engulf our daily lives.
Gleaming Pt 1
I assign meaning with lies lounging on
the retromolar. Indivisible
again and calling you contrapuntal.
Total Annihilation of the Heart and Soul.
Remembering begets forgetting,
shellfish is off the menu:
our diurnal slumber
is finally on & on &
on. Ripped apart by
hands we lounge in
the spirit as the epoch
leaps forward cuz
you don’t dream
much anymore.
Gleaming Pt 2
I wanna wake up—
so fly your narcissistic maneuvers
outside my apartment.
Let us play the oboe
of the nation’s tears. They
lock Dreyfus up and we
all cry a thousand little lambs.
The inversion of your
compulsion is the creation
of love. Can’t get it in and
this time the swans won’t
sing our song. I fall in
love with the world as it
beats me to death.
smile at the past when I see it
After Slauson Malone
Ten thousand miles away, asphalt
takes me back to an
authentic smile; a moment when
a tree was just a
tree and our sunburns were
tangible. Before the image broke
up with the word—when
language didn’t charge a fee
per utterance.
Where you were my friend
and I told the truth.
Google: taking a step knowing
you can never go back
Owen Avery lives in Brooklyn. He enjoys words and images. He has been published in Hobart Pulp, Spectra, Scaffold Lit, and other online worlds. He can be found at Instagram dot com under the name tubofguts.
High Horse 