Sean Moreland

The mis sing

From the tumourlike membrance of a tenuous re:

solve come tiny, edged-red tears, gilt gangrenous.

Sad, rainswept fixities slip, drizzle-sloffd

drown contracted sinuses. Uvula snaps at slow

swallows like a dangledamp mantis; bit dreams

of birdsong bleed deep into chipt chinabowl belly.

Sounds like a ringtone, soul-corrosive, uncoil, curd-

ling innerear. Some sly kin of naked pine’s pins

snuck in tonite & trickt these rabbitfeet into a heartsnare

to strangle w/ softspoken, unsought oughts and fond

condemnations – no prophylaxis against grief-pregnant

absence’s urgent, blind invasions. Something about the

evening’s lovely snarl must’ve hit the missing button,

so Saturday rises from the bath, Venus wrapped in

bruise of Monday’s Pluto-blue. Moonlite  rattles

glass like a wrackt cough; sudden burn w/ red

dish of revery welters. Tongue writhes, phantom

feeling of a name I’ll never be safe to say again.

 Fingers falter over the keys, killed insect clatter of

closed doors, indepth recessed. Broken keys to rooms

in hulderhouses torn down tender years ago –

doors to dead places no one living can let go.

A sharp salt blurt of blindsight, heartstirring

storylines scratch the sky, octoberbare branches

chokevines that, writhing, climb my name. Arid clime of vain

ache for peachsweet  shoulders’ scent,  adrift in empty headspace.

Time shudders as her missing limbs turn tourniquet,

until tonight begs morning to help her to forget.

Inertials

inertia, his initials:

scritches not just

pen t, chatter not just

his teeth as he walks beside

             a ministry of crows, a shepherding of flies

            he turns it, this, his

                                                 body

                                                            over

            to the stones.

Unmoved by stolen

meat, their earthen thirst remains

but this body bucks

and seeps, and gets all

swole, and won't stay 

down in the hole scrabbled

from sod and gravel.

this is his theatre, see:

watch the winter kiss

make each subject

less and somehow

more, each a vivid

coldsore. 

He stands close by, hood-eyed

scribing soft-corps spawn

chewing someone else's

gums with these dawn-clean teeth.

Seek and slam

Dullgray aft’s rough drag with the stark

wake of the goner score, sores of the shaken

stir the streets aching to blacken the package.

Redeye keyed-out pack of dirty pilgrim

sweaters, the sniffling sneakered hunt

snouts out closed faces and cold concrete

until a happy alley spreads treasures

for their play-coloured tenders. Quick

now kids: brassy blues do the corner

the cluster ducks, hastings skirts, flock

back to a grimy public head. Unfazed by

blue lights, diviners of deep venation

they prep with quick breaths, with tremulous

brevity, tapping powder from plastic shells, crouch

of humid  forms exuding need, acrid anticipation.

Flint-fleck and rocketred glare. Amped  Bics

and arcing Zippos. Frothing cook-song of

familial spoons, steel’s black badge

convex bellies small, stainless pregnancies

the kids clutch maternally - syncopated

orchestra of grunts and small seeking stabs

flagging bulbous bloodflowers. Horses surge

the gates, heavy heartfalls and itch-hot crescendos

as they play,  violinists of the breaking veins.

Sean Moreland writes poetry, short fiction and scholarly non-fiction. He is founder and a fiction editor of Postscripts to Darkness (PstD), a serial anthology of weird fiction and art.