Two Poems

Dave Carillo

The Birth

The ways a body will open  :  a becoming scattered earth and skin              
Every hour we pin the new secret headquarters of the heart
                                                                                                 To the brittle maps
That gasps under every burial mark
Of every village and town 
                                          Where the harvest was once    
Arms and legs  
Where we rooted our daises deeply  :  where we soon enough heard lungsounds
And we cut away with flowers once more
::    
The ways I’ve forgotten to forget  :  a becoming the steel in artillery mouths
Mortar shell follows mortar shell
                                                    The cooking dust and smoke cradles the face   
Like a gas mask
And the few delicate arteries of sight   
                                                            By which I lob my body 
From street to street 
Disappear the way families will  :  we discover the bodies and they baffle us
With fables of bone and teeth   
::
What else but to broadcast these dreams freely  :  gunships finish with shiny kisses  
And flop their exhausted bellies
                                                    Onto fresh dozed runways
Ribboning cross the atlas
Jet exhaust turns the sky to fishscales                             
                                                              In a faint white moon
A becoming the newborn and the burned
A becoming ghosts and steam  :  a becoming turbulence
And the fled   

---

The Unfolding

How we’ve dwindled this town to a just a fly
Crashing without end against a window  :  its body sounds deep in the ear
Stays in the ear  :  takes the shape of the bones we never see
In the ear    
::
This is the story of electricity that sleeps for good    
Of the fever memories of well water  :  of the memories of flies bouncing off the surface
Story of the invisible  :  story of demands 
Of the few fires that burn to boil the fever from the drink
::
Exit the fly from the ear  :  we patrol the streets and I dream
The razorwire uncoils with each footstep 
I dream of the sand and nests where mortar fire sleeps  :  the sound of its breathing
Is the sound of names carved on melon rinds
::  
And the story of my hands becoming foreign hands  :  constellations
Of wire and skin in occupied skies  
I make a fist  :  release the fist  : my discovery hushes and sculpts   
My hand again  :  starlight and fist
::   
Then I recall the noonlight in the razor coils   
Then I write home about the moonlight in the curling dust
We suspect the seed and the wells here harbor the spirit of the mortar
And we smoke whatever from its hole