MiPOesias Magazine

BRUCE COVEY

Bruce Covey teaches at Emory University and is the author of The Greek Gods as Telephone Wires and the forthcoming Ten Pins, Ten Frames (Front Room Publishers, March) and Elapsing Speedway Organism (No Tell Books, Fall 2006). His recent poems also appear or are forthcoming in The Hat, Bombay Gin, Explosive Magazine, LIT, Boog City, One Less, 580 Split, Small Town, and other journals. He edits the web-based poetry magazine Coconut and curates the What’s New in Poetry reading series in Atlanta.

Fiberglass

Time to figure out what means.
The day the daisy turned & slept,
The day the character codes aligned
Like planets, ready to revolve.
It’s the little series of threads
Between your bony fingers: Pull red
For next week, yellow for last.

In this province, you have crafts
To attend, iffy caricatures
At the top of the glass escarpment,
A sculpture of a funnel cloud
Next to 30 pairs of shoes &
12 shiny rocks, each telling time.
4 dimes & a muggins, 10
Vulnerable hands, 1 right
After another, & 1 pot of cotton

Thickly woven to produce
Something plain, a single hue
Perhaps—red, say—or a simple
Sentence sans dictionary words,
One I could read if only I could read

Porous Delivery

Even the postal worker leaves it outside your door
Because the mailbox is full of goo & dripping,
Flag up nonetheless, & the stirring partner
Licks & seals all the empties, tidy as
Ice pools, where a single fish, like an iris,
Rests, trickles. Then to gather from the faucet,
The pump, the hose, the well, the bucket,
Each one already emptied because parole
Won’t let you hydrate, their kites fluttering
At the tips of your extensions, windy margins,
Abrasive whirls. Saturn’s the closest approximation,
Because, if you were to line up all of the dominos
According to the digits of pi, you’d be skipping
Instead to the grass is always greener across
The horizontal ladder, where even
Metaphorical gutters need clearing