Tyler Kline
twenty-four seven i am html code
copied & cut from a larger machine / something that killed the dinosaurs into crows but invented jersey garage bands / that were for years a lake of swans but always dreamed of living inside violins / cellar doors / i level into headboards scratching off the names & numbers of last storm’s owners / writing my favorite lyric about eyes so my family remembers to be silent when pouring champagne / talk to my mother who is code for dial-up phone / my father who is deck full of whale watchers crying / never have they drank to being so empty of subtitles like i have / lines translated from the scene where a brother never thinks of his father’s gun in a bedroom that’s code for lottery ticket / this machine / has slept me close enough to caution i start drawing birds / pay attention to disaster like a dog watching a microwave / his boy calling out the reasons never to be buried alive in a storm / the dead sea is still our sea / these winds / just typewriter ribbon my body leaks / this machine / just a catalogue of red slingshots i never learned to fill with clay.
Tyler Kline is the author of the forthcoming chapbook As Men Do Around Knives (ELJ Publications, 2016). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, BOAAT, the minnesota review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Whiskey Island. He is the current Poet Laureate of Bucks County, Pennsylvania and a senior at the University of Delaware
Return to March 2016 Edition
copied & cut from a larger machine / something that killed the dinosaurs into crows but invented jersey garage bands / that were for years a lake of swans but always dreamed of living inside violins / cellar doors / i level into headboards scratching off the names & numbers of last storm’s owners / writing my favorite lyric about eyes so my family remembers to be silent when pouring champagne / talk to my mother who is code for dial-up phone / my father who is deck full of whale watchers crying / never have they drank to being so empty of subtitles like i have / lines translated from the scene where a brother never thinks of his father’s gun in a bedroom that’s code for lottery ticket / this machine / has slept me close enough to caution i start drawing birds / pay attention to disaster like a dog watching a microwave / his boy calling out the reasons never to be buried alive in a storm / the dead sea is still our sea / these winds / just typewriter ribbon my body leaks / this machine / just a catalogue of red slingshots i never learned to fill with clay.
Tyler Kline is the author of the forthcoming chapbook As Men Do Around Knives (ELJ Publications, 2016). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, BOAAT, the minnesota review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Whiskey Island. He is the current Poet Laureate of Bucks County, Pennsylvania and a senior at the University of Delaware
Return to March 2016 Edition