Costel Iarca © 2008 All Rights Reserved
Costel Iarca © 2008 All Rights Reserved
The 30th Birthday
Death flicks my ear
with his stubby finger
as he moseys out the door
and into the garden.
Fatty clouds, sticky
and white, roll along
like cakes on God’s
blue conveyor belt.
Death picks his teeth,
and takes a pee behind
the bushes, winks at you.
The relic buried beneath
the elm is your shinbone.
Or maybe it’s mine.
Caret initio et fine.
I’m wearing a hat
with a little propeller on top.
You are on your knees
near the back porch:
a spade in one hand,
a Twinkie in the other.
Even The End
has to end sometime,
says the Buddha.
Or was that the
neighbor lady peeking
over the fence?
No matter:
I’ve only got one candle,
and the wind is ready to rise.***
Paraphrasing Iraq
Take, for instance,
this secret—
windbanked
and woundwashed:
Take this promise,
(for example)
a cartridge of words
the dead load and lock and
load again:
And take this province of accretion:
skin mapped, flagged,
wired for hum and hush—
these phrases:
unbuckled and broken,
spread out
here
among our rewards.
Everything ordnanced—
Morning’s drab holster
empty and empty and empty again:
There are nouns for this:
ways to say it,
Sounds the body makes,
Shapes that vowels twist the body into.
Where the word ends
avulsion begins.
Dean Rader’s work has appeared in POOL, Parthenon West Review, Connecticut River Review, Colorado Review, Poet Lore, and Common Ground. He has won the Crab Creek Review poetry prize, and is working to finish his first book of poems, Works + Days. He is featured on the Borderlands Web Audio site.