Three by
Mark DuCharme
Vowels
for Rimbaud
My heart runs a carpool
It lances jets of soup
My sad heart reeks of pumpkins
Go ahead, cure all the pumpkins
See if I freeze
While pragmatic lunatics lure
Wretched quail to sketchy
Motels—
O the abracadabra parades!
Comment on our vowels, won’t you, common lore?
Then forget what I mean in a room full of saints
The serpent of croquet was at the bacchanalia, recently
Will call back Tuesday, maybe
Until trees have no habitats left
& The end of the world isn’t safe
For tourists anymore
What you mean is what you are
Forget myth-making
Noon is the shape of lost voices
Flattened vowels, tongues to the ear
Tune
Who are those men who walk awkwardly by
Made acute by their rhythmless gait
As the earth shudders, & we become
Akimbo parts of waking?
We slathered the linoleum, but didn’t do anything
About it ’til later, when the blatherers gathered
To incite us with their mildness.
What have we learned
In the meantime that might
Make sense of those hairstyles that
Birds seem to fear?
If we drive into
The wind when alone
Will our sense of tune be heightened?
& If we wait there, knowing what we do
Only then will those old men fear to come home.
Aliens
for Melinda Myrick
Those doomed to repeat the past
Will register the past as
Failure
If tomorrow ever comes—
& It never does.
What then are we left with
If yesterday’s tragic, & hope’s an altered
Verb? Think in active failures.
Alienate anyone
Who repeats the past as tragic discourse.
Sometimes, we just can’t whistle—
& Love’s not a failure
Bound to alienate anyone
Who doesn’t think of love as active
When altered aliens
Propose a tragic verb.
Mark DuCharme’s sixth full-length book of poetry, Here, Which Is Also a Place, was published in 2022 by Unlikely Books. That same year, his chapbook, Scorpion Letters, was released by Ethel. Later this year, C22 Open Editions will publish his chapbook Thousands Blink Outside. His poetry has appeared widely in such venues as BlazeVOX, Blazing Stadium, Caliban Online, Colorado Review, E·ratio, First Intensity, Indefinite Space, New American Writing, Noon, Otoliths, Shiny, Spinozablue, Talisman, Unlikely Stories, Word/ for Word, The Writing Disorder, and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary. A recipient of the Neodata Endowment in Literature and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, he lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.