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
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.