Duplex Kingdoms

 

  by Jadon Rempel

 

 

 

 

I

 

 

a malfunctioning door locks in or out, permanent or not at all

one side holds present a shadow of feet and not a lonely strip

of light, the one time you always left home for a world of babies

born to mourn the loss of something daily, the first time they

did not cry and you, in search of redder meat, frantically doing

better

 

 

*

 

 

leaning in a closet are the legs you use for falling, a reflex to feel

an appendage, a latch in the absence of its pin misaligns

the strike plate, pitch is heard from the recesses in the

register of a dropped coin on metal

 

 

*

 

 

the walls are salty as skin, yours

where patched cracks tear through

the human promise of scar tissue

 

 

*

 

 

there is a lost pin in the esophagus of the building

 

 

*

 

 

you could say like new, the table cleared of stomachs

fork tines bent like fourths of banana peel, a place set

for Jesus or Elijah just in case, without the table it is a

support group meeting, without chairs we have no

children, the way a room empties of space as we enter

 

 

*

 

 

a fresco painted centuries prior reduced to the sum

of its pixels, on the wall beside the bed we cover up

something worse than bad photography then argue

nightly about the artist

 

 

*

 

 

a planet comprised of water and no water, God’s

teeth soaking in hurricane liquid or the last of the

storm encased clearly behind glass

 

 

*

 

 

more poems than years I promised you a pack

on payday, I promise, I’ve been writing

 

 

*

 

 

I’ll meet you in a closet with two guns

 

 

*

 

 

found pin in the throat building, in itself a suffocant

a cough of cracked bricks, a place you know when

it crumbles, dust-filled lungs enough to say, I hear

you breathing in the asbestos

 

 

 

 

II

 

 

I never told you

the dream you strangled

with tightrope wire

 

 

*

 

 

static loud music, a record needle cuts

the path of dust and old horns pawned

in the firebox darkness, a voice harmonizing

with its distant self, her missing tongue

a ring muted by its finger falls naked to

the floor spinning and stopping

 

 

*

 

 

card follower a rabbit tusk, the calm

of a man paints landscapes one cigarette butt

at a time, when she sneaks from the house

sour throated in search of a river to follow

beyond a competition of fences our world

becomes its own gutter of nature

 

 

*

 

 

in the dark I am the circus freak

I could never be

 

 

*

 

 

I stay in the house dangerous and silent

a cartoon banana peel, a knife beneath the bed

eyes a perfect balance of bullet holes, I am

an old woman asleep in the furniture held warm

beneath an unfinished blanket

 

 

*

 

 

she stops running long enough

to distinguish noise from object

feet sore wondering what shoes

he’d written into the story and

where

 

 

*

 

 

furniture of a horse eaten body, hidden

effigy of things found in absence, abstracting

wood from its glue like ribs from the wet paint

of skin

 

 

 

 

 

Jadon Rempel’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Dear Sir, 42opus, the Rose & Thorn, Blueprint Review, Misunderstandings, Existere, Boxcar, and elsewhere.  He is a recent Pushcart nominee and his latest chapbook, machine will soon be available from Red Nettle Press.