Nate Maxson Implores Your Paper Moon in the Radiating Summer not to Fold Like a Failed Polaroid

A Brief History Of The Eventual

The blood-smell does so excite us

Following it in infrared through skyless forests

Unknown animals: thee and thou, me and you, king and queen, ditch and spring

Just to be sure, I’ll be obvious about my intentions

There are witches beneath the frozen Earth

Their veins shot out like the roots of gnarled Lilacs

We dreamed

Or vice versa

Sirens/ swans

Songs

Fell from storms like slow winters

First I walked barefoot through the weeds

And then the forest grew,

Twisted higher than ashy Eden

Whose wounds I chronicle as reductions to ultraviolet night

Those of you listening through these veils of wire and time discontented

Let me see

Your paper moon

Like I did the first time,

Brighter than the protest of a thousand howling pyres

Heartland, Age 12

The cornfields we used to steal from,

A few ears at dusk

I remember

How cold the rain was

The end of summer

Radiating

Like a dark green river dreaming

Wingspan/Post-Flight Measurements

A vast act of remembrance, this

The Blizzard Forever, 1989 to 2017 (so far)

You hardly notice

The wingspan spreading overhead

I assume

A deliberateness to the motion

Dark water in small amounts

That’s your vaccination

Against exposure kid, against the cold

Folded like a failed polaroid

It could be a dream

I’m in conversation with

But whose?

There’s no great comfort

In the sterile clockwork mathematics of all this

Of course the machinery could be perfected eventually

But it’s less interesting than leaving the grit inside to eat up the gears

I prefer to think in terms of catastrophe, in terms of thirst

A choral ode, a downturn: saltwater in a moon-white teacup

Mistaken for light and sipped with a civilized grimace

Whatever it is that makes you feel better

The etymology will be painfully obvious

Most of the time I measure it in dents and bruises

Compared to the last crash landing

What heals tallied next to what doesn’t

Except on some dusks when I am spectral, uninhibited and wounded

X-rayed till I hiss:

Dancing slow in the thinning shade alone

This way

The divide

Before it disappears,

Before a world begins

A déjà vu is etched in sudden snow

Nate Maxson is a writer and performance artist. The author of several collections of poetry including 'The Whisper Gallery' and 'The Age Of Jive", he lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.