By Robert Krut
THE ANXIOUS LEVER OF LOWERING SKY
Fear is a blade held in a lung.
The sky lowers an inch each night.
Play pin-finger till dawn, you have ten.
Keep sticking your thumb in a socket.
Electrical or eye it’s all the same.
You walk through the room like an aspirin.
Sleep is pointless when day is night.
A lump of ground rises to make your sofa.
When you breathe, you create the clouds.
The clouds are a loose brain of lightning.
That is not something to celebrate.
You did all of this and nothing, take credit, or don’t.
Eat praise like porridge, drink anger like poison.
Both leave you full, exhaling sky.
A knock at the door, but the moon
covers your mouth like a mask.
Originally appeared in Radar
THE DINNER PARTY
All the conversations tonight are about wounds.
What a kind nicety to be tired of talking about wounds.
The wine glasses each have a fingertip in their bowl.
The wounds are described at length.
Looking for an exit, only entrances.
Looking for an entrance, only a wound.
You learned how to give stitches when you were just thirteen.
To yourself, lost in the woods on a camping trip.
The teacher found you, poured alcohol on the suturing.
Raise a toast to memory, raise a glass of fingers.
The table is a boat on an ocean of sighs and then laughter.
Some of the wounds look like a mouth.
The entrance is a window, the window is a ladder.
The host leads a prayer to our wounds.
Everyone is served a plate of teeth.
The laughter is a blade held in your side for safekeeping.
Stand up, stand up and share your wounds.
Or leave the party with a tourniquet and a missing limb.
SCREAM INTO AN OPEN MOUTH
My torso is crowded.
My body grew another heart
to house my rage.
An old man sells hand rolled cigarettes
in an abandoned grocery’s parking lot,
a handwritten sign says
if you smoked, you’d be home now,
until two cops pay a visit.
My hands are packed houses.
I woke up with six fingers on each.
Every finger has four knuckles.
At the gas station up the street,
a guy walks up
to each pump, licks every handle
and walks away.
My organs have re-routed all
mechanisms, as bile turns to teardrops,
saliva becomes blood.
Two people stand on the corner
in front of my very home, screaming
directly into each other’s mouths.
Pausing, they gesture, yes,
we know. Don’t you?
My body grew an extra heart
to house my rage.
Originally appeared in The Superstition Review
A COFFIN IS A BATTERY
A ball of wires, wrapped in a fist.
A wrist of ropes, arm of electricity.
Ambiguity is a lock and ether is steel.
Feel the rods bend to radiation.
Watch this trick: I’m locked in a coffin.
Often the trap is the trick and that is that.
Facts are grubs in a dirt maze.
What stays in the ground is public domain.
Who am I kidding, you punch your way out.
Subtlety is a gift for the privileged.
Edges must be splintered, not smoothed.
Thundered walls make rooms of light.
All of the town draped in power lines.
Fine hairs of stray electricity twitch in wind.
Next to shards of wood, I stand barefoot.
When you come looking, I am the wires.
ACCIDENTAL LIGHT
I’m walking after midnight,
I’m walking before sunrise,
investigating sirens
heard echoing off the bones
in the walls before
I walked out the door.
The only light comes from
the convenience store on the corner
that closed weeks ago,
their electricity still on,
the lottery sign glowing
against the glass that makes
the parking lot swell.
I’m walking alongside shadows
of no one, walking under
the dome curve of a pupil,
scanning for sound but only
finding a possum fighting
a raccoon behind an RV.
In the parking lot of the church
with a sign lit that just says
soon, a single sound calls out,
a car doing donuts, its headlights
off, the tires occasionally screaming
against the pavement
while it keeps circling, circling.
I’m walking long after midnight.
The scars of the world are turning neon.
I’m walking before sunrise.
Knocking on a stranger’s door and running.
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Robert Krut is the author of four books: Watch Me Trick Ghosts (Codhill/SUNY Press, 2021), The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire (Codhill/SUNY Press, 2019), which received the Codhill Poetry Award, This Is the Ocean (Bona Fide Books, 2013), and The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009). He teaches in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lives in Los Angeles. More information can be found at www.robert-krut.com.
