MiPOesias Magazine 2007 ~ Guest Edited by Evie Shockley

Sheer

clear as a bell leaving traces of “compromised musculature”.
A stickler for making sure it is unsolvable. Just after.
Just before. Tutelage. Responding rookie. trained like a
field mouse. pretty as a firebug. often remembered like
cicada. yellow phenomena baffling the historian
like cancer. Imagine the smell. That is how close I am to the
letter. Bound in a line that ascends or descends depending
on how you look at it. stripped of its veneer, maybe.

Efficient and Particular

Efficient and particular as the wind
Isolated and generous as a mailbox
Dark in hue and uniformed. indifferent
to the indifference of cats. A pillow. A cold car
where in it lay a worn blanket.
they went to Washington on four wheels
they were driven to the side of a hill
that slowly rose at least five hundred feet
sloping with all the others into a dense beautiful fog.

Christopher Stackhouse's books are: Slip (Corollary Press, 2005), a collection of poems; Seismosis (1913 Press, 2006), a book featuring his drawings with text by writer/professor John Keene. He is a graduate fellow of Cave Canem, and a 2005 Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for The Arts. A poetry editor at FENCE Magazine, he lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.