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Bryan D. Price

Chrysanthemum time in Rhyolite

Emphatic jukeboxes

New Leviathan

I dreamed of tigers

We were proletarians once

The truth about falcons

The lovesick metronome

Natural light

Kumquats rotting in a shoebox

Excavating the movie ranch

Signified by horses

Crossing the Elbe with you

Chrysanthemum time in Rhyolite

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It is the time of day where I put pants on, go outside, see my doppelganger. The sun sets and rises simultaneously. It is chrysanthemum time in Rhyolite. Air compressors hum gently resonating in the shade of the ruins. Elsewhere some kind of yucca with enormous appendage, phallic in design, stretches out toward heaven, reminding me that I have yet to put my harness on, yet to be pollinated. Another day another woodlark in god’s gaze. A gift to the grave—as naked as a beekeeper.  

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Emphatic jukeboxes

________________________________________________________________________

the most lethal
metaphors imaginable
concern nature
like fossilized air
and emphatic jukeboxes
erotic watercolors dry
in the kitchen
where none of the
genitalia conform


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New Leviathan

________________________________________________________________________

there is a book where a priest teaches Pinochet
the fundaments of Marxism and one where Pinochet
is a vampire and then a locust and then an eyelash a
thunderbird a horsehead a rifle full of Cardinals etc.
the way in which lilacs sit up and sing makes me think of
the new pope who says a few words over the graves of
paratroopers from a subsidiary of the nightmare corporation
in Colorado they proselytize to new airplanes and canisters
of sarin gas in Indianapolis the southern Baptists are
voting on whether or not to invade Mexico where the horses
are eating peaches and the peaches are eating butterflies
and the butterflies are fucking the brains out of the white
moths and the white moths are turning into nighthawks
somewhere near Big Sur where there are no more whales
the death squads emerge from their cocoons…because the
kleptomaniacs have all the guns the death squads are using
their cybertrucks to pull all the brutalist buildings down


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I dreamed of tigers

________________________________________________________________________

I dreamed of tigers: beautiful full sheet of acid
stamped with tiger faces—little tiny tiger faces and you
said I am the mimeograph machine that tells fortunes
I asked you to tell me more about death and you said death

is a pocketknife stuck into the back of a spaceship—a
whole train-car of zygotes pushed into a river of quantum
physics and inert gasses I dreamed of tigers and all
you wanted to talk about was rhinoplasty—showing me

all the before-and-after pictures of brides—one looked
like Joan of Arc who you called Falconetti and we each
cried tears of terror I dreamed of tigers who weren’t
tigers but jailbirds wearing swim fins and copper hats

it was them who introduced me to the five books of Moses
by Christians it was them who took the famine away from
me and now I spend all my nights alone piloting a mule
across the yellow landscape of a lightning bolt’s dream


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We were proletarians once

________________________________________________________________________

taking only a blanket we went to

the deepest part of the canyon to die

no hospice or shotguns

just a pygmy staircase to the moon 


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The truth about falcons

________________________________________________________________________

there are pictures of it—of cliffs and sand
of infinite sky of waterfalls and falcons
of falcons dreaming about falcons and waterfalls
of falcons holding cameras and cameras
holding cameras of cigarettes and cigarettes
being smoked (or at least held) by hospital
orderlies traversing the campus unsteadily in all-
terrain-vehicles there are pictures of photographs
in other words photographs of photographs
in other words art without aura the kind of art
favored by executioners and other people with
dubious sexual ethics when the executioner
smiles at the photographer the photographer says
if men were angels there’d be no need for airplane
glue and the executioner says amen but he
says it as if he’s just going through the motions
much has been made of the veracity of
photographs but I remain unconvinced when
it comes to truth I prefer smells—the smell
of burning tires for instance reminds me of
you when I smell that specific acrid odor
and watch the whole sooty mess unfurl and
befoul the sky I wonder about dropping you
a line but then think better of it for I have
nothing more to say to you about falcons or
any other such thing having to do with the past
incidentally falcons are just a metaphor
for or excuse to talk about some unbearably
heavy things—awful things that cannot be
discussed in a public forum because there is a
prohibition against the discussion of infidelity
and plural marriage and yet here we are rejected
by something or someone or everything—god
rejects us the earth rejects us it all starts in the
kidneys and then spreads to the lymph nodes etc.
love is a kind of amputation or infection
solitude is nothing more than a lonely existence
that we use a series of props or objects to
represent ourselves within: me with Fidel
Castro’s exploding cigar me with contaminated
hairbrush me with bathtubs filled with gasoline
me with Lucite dog holding Lucite crucifix me
with Thompson submachine gun covered in the
cutest dancing bears stickers me with canker
sores that the photographer continues to
gawk at as he holds his flash up like a starter’s
pistol before counting to three and then asking
me to recite every crime I’ve ever committed—
every moral crime starting with being born
this will be fun he says and his smile which is
slightly equine reminds me of Edgar Allen Poe
who like me also violated his temperance pledge 

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The lovesick metronome

________________________________________________________________________

the attic is infested with hummingbirds again
or the dreams of hummingbirds which are
very rarely of hot lips salvia but mostly about the
apocalypse or churches without stained glass windows
there is something Homeric about this house—
the way it bends sideways as if it’s leaning
leeward toward Miletus which was burned over
and over again like a lovesick metronome
I’ve come to find sorrow in
the concept of white noise machines
you can hear it if you listen closely to the good ones
like a fused pair of benzene wedding rings
or the sound of an electric guitar but with its
circuit board all gunked up so instead of sounding
like a purgatory drone it sounds like chess-
pieces being moved across an irregular heartbeat
at my most depressed or morose I asked
you to guide me through the heart of the metropolis
where Kublai Khan once saw Fra Mauro’s map
(the one without oceans) in a flashback
or dream about Marco Polo’s butterfly collection
you led me like a deer on a rope to a
railcar where someone had spray-painted
graffiti that said: death to the robot plenitude     

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Natural light

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I’ve seen that picture of you before—the one where
you’re sitting on a seersucker couch in natural light
penitents fabricated that couch for you on the grounds
of a Louisiana work-farm in 1974 the watchword in
those days was pinewood—pinewood everything:
coffins couches the crematorium the carpet reminds me
of a community college or jail the kind that everyone
just flicks their ashes or spits out blood upon as if we
all didn’t have to conduct our mating rituals on such
tightly woven blue carpets I’ve read your stories about
skullduggery and rough trade in the navy I’ve read
the one about anarchists from Eugene who get caught
up in the machinery of a federalized dystopia I’ve
seen your grave beneath a single tooth-colored cloud
the shape of a demolished house someone left you a
pack of menthols and the pack of Uno playing cards
that I used to Excommunicate all the Shetland ponies   

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Kumquats rotting in a shoebox

________________________________________________________________________

yes I want to shower with you
and yes there are
kumquats rotting in a shoebox
but first I have to read
about misery and suffering
I have to read about the war dead
and extralegal violence
about men who learn to pilot
ersatz airplanes so that nothing may
remain secure in its mother’s arms 
then I have to prime the pump
and trim the olive trees
a palm frond takes up space
in the desert and I need to weigh
the contents of the bird’s nest
where my last smile went to die
there are other corpses in there
not corpses but exoskeletons
exoskeletons of lab rats and suicide
notes written on trains
not exoskeletons but serene echoes
not suicide notes but farewell
letters written because there are
men rampaging down the hall
I need you to know that
everything works until it doesn’t
the plumbing works and the air
conditioning works and the
sun does what the sun does until
it puts itself out like a cigarette
and the moon keeps up its
feverish pace until it crashes into a
ravine only to be rescued by two
Ursulines with bad backs
yes I want to shower with you
but first I have to put
these kumquats someplace safe


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Excavating the movie ranch

________________________________________________________________________

I was cruising the alkaline subdivision looking
for interlopers and turncoats to have dinner with
all the televisions were on and
tuned to the same frequency—dialed in
portentously or perhaps pornographically
maybe it’s normal to live in total
darkness—the kind made up of ceremonial blues 
and yellows confessional reds mutating into
creeping oranges and soundless grays
when I think of you I imagine
burnt peaches smeared across a depleted
sky the color of full-scale nuclear war
I may break glass and transform the synergy
of any given subway car but I command very little
in the way of attention from you and your
girlfriends—a flock that I’d still  like to join
when I close my eyes I see earth-movers
rattling toward the dump with their radios going
full blast on the astrology-slash-numerology station
one of you comes to my door and knocks
apologetically on the frosted glass
and when I fail to appear leaves a note that says
are you listening to Link Wray in there 

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Signified by horses

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Dreams are literal. I found a pack of playing cards on the sidewalk. They cost someone ninety-eight cents. Somewhere in the past Jokers were signified by horses. One has a red bridle. I don’t know why. What does each card mean? Nine of diamonds, six of spades, three of hearts. And then I received a message from an unknown number with a Manhattan area code. It said, good afternoon, do you want to go have a cup of coffee together tomorrow. Yes, I want to have a cup of coffee with you tomorrow. Who are you unknown person? Can you teach me about the Koran? I hope you are a woman. I’d like it if you were a goddess. I mean actually divine because something is broken. Something has exploded or imploded or been expurgated by some sovereign force. Something has gone extinct. The plenitude cannot be restored or repaired. The prototype has been scapegoated. I wish. I wish. I wish.

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Crossing the Elbe with you

________________________________________________________________________

I’ve been reading Kafka in bed
I’ve been wearing an old-fashioned
shirt the kind with no buttons (or very
few buttons) I’ve been listening to the
radio and contemplating the parabolic
I’ve been saying the words (or names)
Prometheus and Godhead and wondering
about the circumference of a polycule
I’ve been thinking about translators
who are married and those who
translate alone I have an obsession with
the translators of surrealist poets
some are obsessed with voyeurism or
taxonomies of pain but I am obsessed
with difficult shades of yellow—butter
banana the inside of certain kinds of
plums and the skull in the Parkin
painting Memento Mori which reminds
me of Crossing the Elbe with you  


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Bryan D. Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023) His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Glacier, Boulevard, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.

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