Balancing; Another Heatwave; Stake Out; In the Glitter Pattern

Balancing
 
To have a body caught in wind
To glide on fresh street slurry
To power every mechanism
            with your legs and eats
To know that if you stop
            the pavement will take
            all the skill, skin away
            from your elbows knees
            and keep it for itself
To scab over and keep cycling
To be dried like paint
            on the canvases in the wing
            of the museum you dream of most
To pass through exhibition rooms
To permanently build collection
            and loss
To know there’s a whole surface
            of the tile you’ll never
            see again
To bunny hop above a missing road
To be in nightmares
            only when detached from ground        
Another Heatwave
 
You’re poured into those clothes
sloshing cotton blends, sounding your vowels
into the machete blades of a box fan
in a garage. Its switch fries, and we make
a nest of wire. Little birds live.
 
You say you want to know, that a god
should put all their stuff
behind those eyes, all your heaven, a whole sun
—plasmatic and self-consuming—
attached in one weird head.
 
You knew a guy who had that.
He was evicted over a three-month process.
An automatic motorcycle is left in a shed,
tires deflating from stillness. The land
lord asks if you are interested.
 
There’s no breeze to pull at tree palms
like loose hair, long leaves to twitch
inconsistent as a river. You boil and chew an egg,
unsure if it’s a taste to really like, or have just
gotten used to, 
 a chair that’s not stuck to your skin.
Stake Out
 
I watch the cop because it’s legal to,
see his sergeant cruiser taxi in the red,
where a resident’ll take 
 that tight right off the stop sign
and clip his bumper and we’re not going anywhere.
 
We wait for it: excessive blame logged
in an onboard networked console. His hand
is a Frappuccino holster. He’s not activated
just yet. You’re protected until you’re not.
 
And someone does roll the stop, breaking
the box, but no sirens wind. He lets it slide,
white sugar dissolved in dark water down a throat.
Or he missed it, 
 a moment monitored in a different mirror.
In the Glitter Pattern
 
In the deep coats of dogs along the cliff, 
 in surfboards
strapped to cars’ rooves, 
 hooked to the sides of bikes.
 
There’s thunder to make 
 on the newest hottest day of the year,
our melting skin rivering to violent runs.
 
We chase the path of light on this ocean,
who leads to caverns below its own tension.
 
We can get there in time, 
 where sun descends into the head. We lose
a minute each day that’s collected 
 and spent by the moon.
 
Every body is this nut in a crow’s beak
that’s dropped in a vehicular stampede for the meat.
 
Little blades of rain fall through empty. 
 They needle at air
neighbors exchange and share just before the pour.

Photography CreditJason Rice

Adam Deutsch is the publisher at Cooper Dillon Books, and has work recently or forthcoming in Poetry International, Thrush, The Cossack Review, Ping Pong, and Typo, and has a chapbook called Carry On (Elegies). He is an English professor at Grossmont College and lives in San Diego, CA. He can be found at adamdeutsch.com