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 Credit: Jason 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