Gregory Lawless
Notebooks
Light built of ghost bricks. Clatter of magpie and Canada jay. A horse steps into a lake, stops, bows low for water. Knuckles of stars, dry parings of ago. Singed birds, like crust withering, bread just smoke you can eat. Pine trees comprised of idle daggers. These hours, barn-dark and God-hot, no good for going away. Water, wind, the breath between your teeth. Your tongue’s back broken. Your blood tied in a knot. Sing, that is, until they tell you to stop.
Crow heart, silo high
Crow heart, silo high, mid careening. Thermals flicker finger feathers. A blink of tar. Plane pulse through cloudbank and what after that? A red vanishing. I am afraid to fly, to look down on my dreams: the seeming all bricked with blue. Lightning eye high. Crow weather trading shadows for severed breezes. For shares of uninhabitable sky.
Glass
It was like, he tried explaining.
The kind of rain that, if you were a certain kind of
artist, you might imply, not with paint, but with
analogous materials.
Crushed glass, say, or recordings of birdsong for an
installation.
She was quiet, so he tried to explain it, again, from
the beginning.
Gregory Lawless is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of I Thought I Was New Here (2009). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the National Poetry Review, Best of the Net 2007, Cider Press Review, Zoland Poetry, Devil’s Lake, Third Coast, Salamander, Sonora Review, the Cincinnati Review, Artifice, Gulf Stream, Transom, Thermos, and many others. He is a four-time Pushcart nominee. He teaches writing and literature at Suffolk University in Boston.
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