I walk in the park
and select a maple leaf.
With my Sharpie I write:
...
The farmer sent his child
Deep into the orchard
...
They say they found me in frozen foods, stretched out
in the cephalopod case, rowing the air
...
They told me, fetch the jawbreaker
They told me, take down the wash
They told me, any day now, any day
...
I watch my neighbor cut our grass
With his teeth. Clouds pass under
...
The large body waltzed the small body
Across the room. A mother and child?
...
Mother died today or was it yesterday,
I can't quite remember, is funny unless
...
As the cellist played a gigue, Bach,
at Virgil's, a cantina on Salem Street
...
Draw a zigzag moustache below my nose
in permanent ink, stain my lips with black cherries,
...
The birthday party was evaporating, the cake,
crumbs, the donkey, pinned, Mary-the-boy-pony
...
A mouth sings ballads, a mouth sucks a lemon,
a mouth hides uncouth words under its tongue,
...
At the stoplight in Dogleg children swept metal
detectors over my hood, the road turned
...
A curtain of hazy attitude
colors the axis, heavy breathers appear,
sweaters and leaves demand coloratura,
...
We arrived and it wasn't so bad. Really
not at all troubling, the way you sometimes hear.
The anthems were fish out of water.
...
I should have known first aid. Like I could have saved her.
So I shadowed the professional librarians. I didn't say boo
For two, even three months. Worst case? People will learn
...
Night is for ears.
We are prone, and smitten to spontaneity.
I read an essay delineating the uneasy invention of erasers.
...
Peter Jay Shippy was born in Niagara Falls, New York. He was raised on his family's apple farm, on the shore of Lake Ontario. He was educated at Northwestern University, Emerson College, and the University of Iowa, where he received an MFA. Shippy's first book, Thieves' Latin (University of Iowa Press) won the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize. BlazeVOX Books published Alphaville, an abecedarian suite, in 2006. Rose Metal Press released How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic in 2007. Saturnalia Books will publish A Spell of Songs in 2013.)
Portrait Of God On Work Release
I walk in the park
and select a maple leaf.
With my Sharpie I write:
YOU ARE HERE.
Carefully, I place the leaf
back where I found it.