A CHILDHOOD DESIGN WORKSHOP

This is not a thing for children: to design.
The eyepatch flattening the plump cottage
to a postage stamp: this is flight.  The picnic outside.
Under the siding, our inner sanctum
devoured by carpenter bees.  I’ve called
the landlord many times.  What do we care?
A crisscrossed incentive seems to rot in the mouth,
but they’ve lately been refusing to mow under the wires.
It’s not so much that I care, my mom always says,
but that I’m supposed to care.  This meant that we should
haul the weight of their judgments
off with our routines, quickly keeping
our dams, which work a little too well,
hidden behind the overgrown passages of grass,
the prairies that neighbors could easily mistake for weeds.

TEE-SHIRT

If I can’t wear it ironically

I can surely wear it strangely

And around the corner

Singing cautiously, “In the salt of the day

In the stars of the night

   We proclaim the Mesclun salad days!”

But in the faux fancy tea house salad

Four lonely leaves

Qualified as a namesake.

I want to discreetly wrap up that crap,

Put it in a Styrofoam box

And throw it off a cliff

Or, perhaps, more lyrically:

I want to stick it in

Like Dvorak again.

Rhyming just for the fun of it

In the dark, next to the wine stain,

Next to the skipping CD, next to

Almost nothing but refrigerator hum.

A HOAX IN LAMB’S CLOTHING

Quite possibly a fake poet

Saying fake

Metaphysical things.

Whenever I don’t want to do something

Like order pizza or do the laundry

I say that I’m not very good at it.

Francis Raven is a graduate student in philosophy at Temple

University.  His books include Shifting the Question More Complicated

(Otoliths, 2007), Taste: Gastronomic Poems (Blazevox 2005) and the

novel, Inverted Curvatures (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005).  Poems of his have

been published in Mudlark, Conundrum, Chain, Big Bridge, Bird Dog,

Caffeine Destiny, and Spindrift among others. His critical work can be

found in Jacket, Logos, Clamor, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art

Criticism, The Electronic Book Review, The Emergency Almanac, The

Morning News, The Brooklyn Rail, Media and Culture, In These Times,

The Fulcrum Annual, Rain Taxi, and Flak.

POETRY