residuals

So often
the setting is the home of my childhood.
The garage, full of multiplying and subtracting cats,
the yellow-and-orange-streaked linoleum of the kitchen, the lava
of my boyhood games,
the windowless den. When I picture that room,
it is only lit by the shaky glow of the television.
It is a museum alive
with memories that breathe and laugh softly,
of items and objects
long ago lost or left behind,
of things just of out sight or
off the edges of old photographs.
The characters
are so often out of place,
think Holden Caulfield
in fair Verona
or Huck Finn in Revolutionary France.
It is as if a passenger train on a time-lined track
had its cars rearranged at random,
the giants of my life, strangers to each other,
introduced and allowed
to mingle.
My lover stands with me at the cool glass of the front door,
his arms around a former version of myself.
I can smell the Windex
my mother cleaned with,
can smell the Christmas trees
from those young Decembers.
We look, together, at the neighborhood he never knew
as he holds this cloudy-eyed boy
who thinks nothing
of a lifetime condensed, strained,
the things most loved,
remaining.


bryan borland (Little Rock, AR, 1979)

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ink received from the editor's pen

The trend now is to take song lyrics
and replace one word in the chorus
with a contemporary word
like tweet,
so, for example,
you keep on tweeting my love into the borderline
or
I would tweet anything for love but I won’t tweet that.
It's not plagiarism because we've replaced a verb.
The trend now is to avoid entire elements of language.
This is what I recommend.
Replace any adverb with the name of a television show.
It's something our readers will recognize.
She went down the stairs dancing with the stars™.
Readers will feel their living rooms.
And forget iambic.
It's been done to death.
The hot thing now is to correlate a poem with the speech pattern of
the actress who adopted all those children from Africa.
Pop culture and supporting a cause!
The trend now is to write a haiku
and delete every third word.
It saves us time and space
for ad revenue.
This is what it sounds like
when doves tweet.


bryan borland (Little Rock, AR, 1979)

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morning coffee

I missed you like summer
to a frostbitten
finger.

Yes,
I missed you like a limb
lost to the jaws
of an alarm clock.

I missed you like
the spoiled flesh of young love
aches
in the haze of separation,
and, though our divorce
was to be permanent,
your custody
of my consciousness
left me in a world of constant dark.

What good is a poet
without a cup of something?
Wine
in the evening,
or in the nearing dawn when creation stretches long,
but an early-hours citizen of a
Decaffei-Nation
I am not.

Returning to you,
carried like a queen
on the able-bodied shoulders
of your aroma,
you are again the warm sunlight
on my nearly withered leaves;
my steaming mug of photosynthesis
with a little
cream and sugar.


bryan borland (Little Rock, AR, 1979)

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