Tsunami

With abalone hair, string-tuned
Medusa turned men to stone
melted night-mare

eyes. Gone, faces
carved in trees, endless
monuments.

The sea kept churning
lifting things up
from deeper places.

Beware one location
but not another? It
does not have to be this way.

Walk beaches in broken step,
coal-black sand, demanding hearts, twisted
limbs, dreaming sea walls, expressive hands.

Up the shore
amidst curled-curved culverts
— a ribbon- of police

Uninformed men  ecstatic women
thrown out of ocean on angrier waves,
hurtling the thrusting scruff of fluted palms

---

Milk River

Metal  taste     methane

his military      chest medallion

Not lucid    —    I mention  —    paper bags

and brows in terror

A terrace  of   tears   mother   weeping in

a water-closet        open  door

Coming up: The Dire Wolf    (in an ambulance)
locked in starlight.

Ambling towards comatose
Ample   verdant not ambulatory

Father, staggering   towards a dish of  sugar

To make an oven tray-full of sacred
burnt – blurred –left upper cut  trunk

of (words)

Borrow into
the armature.  Sutured.

A sentient tattoo —

sewing the lips up
tight        Night of churning

Eyes of black stitches   —

Threading a  blood needle
Crimson    marooned
with ampules.  Knitting

the Moon.

Terrible.  Father.

Cold pours with gasoline into Milk River.

---

Econoline economies

With economics
(par excellence)    the
Industrial waste land    measured

by unit     display    porch
lamps (in fog)

the pariah ( parasitical )
(in parenthesis)

The parent wheel endeavour
The coach-wheel-brokers

Wheel upon wheel      work
Is attitudinal

(respect the Gold Standard)

A   RUSH ))))))))

In the schools of regents regret
Neglect is procedural            a   (regal)

routine
(innocuous)

this route and the railroad # tracks

all crown imperial uranium techniques !
on the television   the umpire   strikes

to clear the fields,
clear them  the (TIN FOIL TRUMPETS)

Colgate       clerestory       chloroform

Clear the head  – reading — Irigaray —

(the Irregular Currents/ of Hollywood monsters
and British investiture    the    inventories
of misadventure    the Dividends)

 

Ruptured mined   in Hydro   waterfalls

Velcro   sheets

 

Hydrophone  euphemism        Hyper-oxide
Hydroxide

The beauteous rapture   at Bala

Running together a long stretch of forgetting    (forgeries)
Fording picture frames all hammered edges

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Robert Frede Kenter is a writer, visual artist and editor.  He is the EIC and publisher of Ice Floe Press.  His writing and images have been published and exhibited widely including: Burning House Press, Dandelion, New Quarterly, Cough, Anthropocene, Going Down Swinging (Melbourne), Visual Verse, Grain, Arc, Writ, Twist in Time, the Failure Bailer and Black Bough. His chapbook Audacity of Form (2019) is available from Ice Floe Press. He tweets at @frede_kenter.