Credit: Dave Whyte
Another Means of Egress
after J. Khalil-Huffman
you needn’t but open the wrists of cars
and bring the din of cars.
you need only to pardon
the dewed fields for submitting
and then to follow the fields’
openings onto corridors
of powerlines. you can hold powerlines,
torque the windlass
and find yourself in a suburb
of yourself, and find yourself
in a suburb of yourself,
tackling a lawnchair.
or rotating an angel neither plaster
of paris nor imagined nor real,
or riding another means of egress,
a car without wrists.
you find yourself riding another
tree, limning that tree.
or in a suburb of yourself find yourself,
juggle the solid dew,
punch out a plumb street light.
favor a slow ruler
or tackle saplings or
tackle the suburb of your mother
passing through the screen door.
basically, it is simple, you just
tackle your sister who
is passing through the screen door.
it is simple. you just
marvel at the pitch and yaw and
imagination of biplanes. you pass
solid dew from hand to hand,
and you pass solid dew
from hand to hand, and
you land yourself on water.
At Remove
against
dusk particulate and settling
dead into hillocks
your father attends
his father who
is fitful also
settling into
his limbs increasingly
separate phenomena
or so I imagine
when
you tell me in a voice I think
I understand
how
your grandfather’s death sparks
lively
in the break in your
father’s voice unless is it the phone
there is something in is
there something there
that question compiling
its own
history of the tool-wielding animal
over these last one
hundred years the heart
itself
the un-worked-upon worker
Lee Norton lives in New York, NY, where he teaches literature and writing. His poetry has appeared in 6×6, Drunken Boat, Supermachine, Aufgabe, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Sawbuck. He is a PhD candidate in English literature at UNC-Chapel Hill.