Five Poems

by Ally Harris

BRASSIER

Red-eye slough on her animated like, clear jag, nay redness, broke into pieces. Those pieces into pieces, ay. Auto-hero mother dosing high chance with real mews at her mouth, frill on her winered jaw. All sang in sun-dark there, way alone, local. Lazy coins gave out as bet to some old thought. Con the row. Fat ailbox beckoning, he lance “been” under the loom, more pieces incandescent. A dance, that last gas at the far-away morrow. And I like the seat of jeans positioned under the machine, ready for that conical mirror to lace me.

OVERPASS

In red void light changes. Skips like a stone, splinters off into the music of number. Such breaking sharpens. One sharpens not so easy. Lacquered into sad local garb whorls prism at the foot of the glass-glinted hill/at that body of water/absolute womb. One stands. One thinks of standing. Action and thought, translucent or invisible? Contaminated. Diagonal shoots to break the neck of light division. Diagonal shoots to kill. The presence of grain in pure vision. Muted over a ribbon of space: Braying human. Perfume of tobacco. The cassette rolls over, clicks, and starts again.

INTERLOCUTER

So rings ulterior jilt in the ides, my talisman. Taupe east. Two pieces of idiotic lettuce for dinner. I tell dog life is hard, ford the whinny. Tell me, dog, hear me say it back to me. The tome unfurls: my holy last gold-crusted ornament, miles along that hieroglyphic tabloid, an incorrigible tear mates form to dye my image—I smear that defect’s name, dry purr, become what smell? What slippery center light? Refer to the previous garbage. I lift it to the brightening beacon.

UNDER THE DARK LIGHT OF THE GENERATOR

Colic frisks the lapel in nine tones meant to depress & destroy the new sanctity as dispute warbles over the lauded goblet into the public center, each ogre tongues an ounce of whatever piss on the dead is meant to offend the living.

ALIENS & BOGS

Cutting your throat open sticking my foot in the cut wriggling my toes in the square of your breath like a megastore come to push worthless doubloons from your useless aperture and your fat jiggles and your throat is made useful as I fondle my dresses in an earthquake-safe corner looking at you looking I cut a dish in your face with my mind’s long fingernail and the font changes

Ally Harris

Ally Harris has poems in Agriculture Reader, Cutbank, Tarpaulin Sky's Chronic Content, inter|rupture, Poor Claudia, and BOMBLOG, as she was a finalist for their 2012 Poetry Contest judged by Ben Lerner. She graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop with an MFA in Poetry and currently teaches composition to aspiring veterinary technicians in Portland, OR.