Bruce Beasley

As the gone- translucent octopus jet-blasts into evasion, vanishing while its ink-sac spurts a cloud of defensive mucus & coagulant azure-black pigment, self-shaped octopus imago in ink, so the shark gnashes at that blobbed sepia phantom, [...]

Abundant deprivation, glossolalia of hail on windows, the splintered ice-crust of the roadside muck:I take the names of things that remain— stinkhorn rising over dead sweet basil, the roses' chokehold, still, on the frozen summerhouse. [...]

    I know what we call it      Most of the time.      But I have my own song for it,      And sometimes, even today,      I call it beauty. —James Wright, "Beautiful Ohio" I don't know why I live in Ohio, where Stinking Creek [...]

There are words on the edges of things, parasitic, hungry for meaning— How I want them: mourn and extinguish, exoskeleton and wing. . . . I hold out my hands, murmuring "Lent" means spring, murmuring cracked rocks on the creekbank, slimy with m [...]