Knee deep in mud. For centuries, we have stood where the bogwaters suck.
In the grasp of the inanimate,

there are no straight lines. A sack race is good for a laugh.
And like the Lord’s own trumpets, funnels multiply in the muck.

Once again, darling, yours is a resinous, intimate whisper.
Once again, I’ll bring you pelts and sprigs of heather.

Halfway into the journey – just puncture me with a compass.
Zero-kilometer, where fabled rivers converge, reversing polarity: drain.
Suppose it a tunnel, at once the air is set tight as a lattice.
Hurray! You are launched from the maw of a soil-based yawn.

Hangnail, dangled all the way down to the switchflow entrails,
there to consult the register: vapors, extralarge rock, and the coiled bands.
You unfasten your jaw at the plywood façade like a conscript,
oil, the armed, double-barreled ram turns the corner: en garde!

З ранку вони йшли вулицею в безладді
скляні вежі схожі на зв'язані баранки
що підвішені до порожнечі

продивляючись звідусіль
наскрізні бджоли, які уникають себе наче
це і є контакти контакти
дзвін і в разі чого оборона

since morning the street was lined with
glass towers chiming like salami
dangled from vacuum

from any vantage transpicuous
intersections of buzz and breeze
          (nerves) as
if all’s about these: contacts and contracts
ring and if anything sting