Brandon Shimoda
A Giant Asleep in Fortune’s Spindle
Morning at the shore
A veteran on stilts, with burial-length loaves
Of bread
About immodest wind
Combustive notes from a reed
Whistle. Mouths have been removed
To populate compromised gardens
Tulips
Prior to raiding
The open. Paraplegic
Dough
Rises in nests
Who or what was he
Or she. Where were the hands of his or hers
To what imperial organ
Wed. Myths
Difficult to place
Urchins floating the petaled canal
The grandiose turning from help
Funneling into the fires of home
Does he or she approve the smell of the new
Or like a rat in benighted tunnels gets used
To anything crisp and hustled white garbage
A Giant Asleep in Fortune’s Spindle
MAMANASQUOG: NO—
NO MORE WINTER
SLIGHT BRANCHES—
Once. Once
Trees marked with slashes
Meant another head beaten to liquid
Oriental, in the olden tongue—
Every hour, a temple
Spreads its legs
Munitions and flat cake pour out
Children wet in it, as it were
Melt off the gathered birch skirt night, if not
Inimical
To the weight run up their necks
Once. Once
I did not care
But to eat a hole through friends I share
The matter needed to sustain
Dark labor … pulling legs into fur
Feet into hooves, donning the black
And white head, the tight skull
At first glance, I thought, how hideous
A woman half-committed
To gravity, half
Stepping out as a mammal
With blood stuffing, and fresh, not flesh
For loose country … and yet
I commend her when dancing
A Giant Asleep in Fortune’s Spindle
FOR ANSWERS BLASTING THROUGH THE STREETS
FOR THE BENDING OF LEGS MID-STANZA
Warm house. Little sticks. Swollen books
In the auric mode of accepting death
Gallery of the semi-dead
Shepherding their backs to us
Phantasm at the river
Coronaries ripen
Where rivers pull away
Women
Age
Into the crushing complacency of the rose after dinner
Long wooden moons in stiff water
Howling the canopy
Volume says murder takes place quietly
Is how I developed my bruises
Dirty helping of mucusfish leaping through long, black hair
From a vantage of distress
Attacks a beautiful face. Why must there be
A beautiful face? Must it tremble?
Keep your oars florid in a jar of afternoon thunder
It is seven in the evening. You are writing
You are looking across the room
At the girl you love might die at eight
Cannot risk dozing off the shelves
An exposed spine articulates with charm
For the locals write waiting for. Indians—
A Giant Asleep in Fortune’s Spindle
