next to nothing is where we grew
eagerly up, home an approximation of somewhere else

ersatz Africa where soldiers planted live mines and played
dead, decades later they found one, an officer

lost in his own land, lost to the game
everyone got tired of playing

skeleton in uniform, how time
conscripts the sinners and innocents

alike. but that’s not right you say, no one is innocent

+

a battered piano cowers in the corner of the empty sanctuary

memory in extremity, unthinking fingers gently coax the ghosts out of a song long forgotten

battered by the waves / my ship’s too small to save your mother sings, little boats in frothy water, little
****** barren island of you

orange at first then blue in all its hues, the sanctuary filled and emptied of light

you would be amazed by the miracles I’ve seen. or have you been promised too many already

clouds long to be shadows / mountains want to be meadows, your mother’s voice tattered at the edges of sleep

art is unnecessary, obscene even. I see that now. what I thought I had sacrificed I had simply abandoned

+

lost in the idea of redemption or rather lulled into the
undertow of the idea which
drags me out further into shimmering inhospitable
lands that once stared up into miles
of ocean. wasn’t it God who made me this
way I used to say when I was feeling especially
cruel. the sun forgives the moon its grand illusion
Abraham slices Isaac’s throat and walks back down the mountain alone

+

blue of the robin’s demolished eggshell, my daughter
asks where are the birdies daddy. blue of the scaffold of sky painted with
robins so blue it hurts. we live on the edge of the sudden nothing for miles

sun like a god that makes you say sorry for spilling your juice like his father and his

taillights of trucks pass through town like red blood cells
off to some better extremity, the tips of things have all the fun

Wednesday nights at the Stardust Inn my mother played piano for the lonesome drunks
catechism of sadness, sickness as ritual, they opened their cavernous mouths
and she lay down on their swollen tongues

+

virgin glass the first version of the self born
in furnaces of sand limestone and ash the
clash’s police and
thieves on the stereo our lives beyond tonight
outside our capacity to imagine marlboro
reds spread their sick bouquet from a shallow
vase your face
in the broken plate of mirror
lines around your eyes disappear
lines form outside the door to oblivion
enter you say enter enter enter over and over you
can’t understand
anymore what it means

+

part of me is afraid of what I’ll find
at the end of this highway

sun-colored skin of the comfortably moneyed

arabesque as prayer
dancers with whole bodies almost
entirely in heaven

nights that descend from the blue mountains
and carry away loners with warm whispers and
chloroform. tendrils grow out of the ocean
asking for directions, taking me home

+

long afternoon shadows leak from palms, burnt
orange turns violet on the distant
side of the mountain where golden poppies grow in the
aftermath of the fire, every petal a fibrous memory of flame

not everyone gets to
go home, not
everyone wants to

late nights on the road to nowhere blur into
early morning prayer to the cruel administrator of my
self-destruction. look at it you pathetic loser you fucking
coward I shout. a photo of flowers that grew in my
absence cut and placed in a vase

+

black orbs of caviar in a pile like a failed god’s discarded worlds
earlobes stretched towards death with diamonds
vintage Corvette convertibles with angry
engines and bright white grins at the wheel

remember how we tried to open the
locked door to the blinding Palace of Glass and Handbags
you pointed incredulously at the crafted brass
handle but inside two animatronic odes to fashion
indicated with a synchronous swivel of
lacquered heads that we were surely
lost, we should surely get lost. we did but not before you
showed them your unadorned finger. I’m not far now from the
coast from what I had until now considered the end of
away. but there isn’t, is there. an end to away

+

Saint Christopher paces the length of the pier
anointing the heads of melon and abalone

nannies push their payloads into the ever after
tall specimens contort their forms to fit the frame
arms and legs bent like alabaster cranes who forsook
migration for stillness, for provocation of the restless
ocean’s depthless compulsion. to become deathless

nearest the heart of grief the heat
intensifies, becomes unbearable, nothing but the
conflagration survives. if I teach you
anything I hope it’s this: don’t
confuse the light of the fire of despair for
a sun

*

Brian Russell is the author of The Year of What Now (Graywolf). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Kenyon Review. He lives in St. Louis.