Factory Reading

 

Don’t you know, when you show up
hardly anyone else will. Oh, everyone will

.   be there.
The clouds eclipsing other clouds. If there’s

danger, if there are shades of colors
oscillating . . . Everyone claims to be

.   responsible for
that as well. They hang on to the bed sheet

dangled from the window. There is the
cacophony of face and hair. You smell

.   like crayon
and you smell like yeast. I was eleven and

I was forty-eight. August went sailing
through the nighttime shade of never

.   confirming anything
beyond what’s flesh, the smell of sleeping in

too late; the taste of a second kiss one
afternoon. One person did read her poems,

.   and her
hands were enormous. They say in dreams

you cannot taste what you eat. That the world
is only a symbol of itself, a representation of fact.

***

Angle of Purpose

 

The garden, preliminary family

the laminate view, and the smell of wet hills

I rose to the wounds

the big bang represented by this peach pit

that’s my kind of peaceful

a ball made of wood rolling on wood all night

a flashlight, trying to impress

It’s time to return to the chances

tree-dappled light illustrative lyricism

the fly-away tents

those years, like a funnel of emotional weather

acorns and raindrops

depression and Benadryl

cloudy most days

the Midwest tastes like a penny

***

David Dodd Lee’s Animalities was published in 2014. Unlucky Animals, a collection that includes original poems, collages, erasures and dictionary sonnets, will appear in early 2019. He is the author of ten books of poems and his artwork has been featured in three one-person exhibitions since 2014. Recent artwork has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, The Rumpus, and Twyckenham Notes. In 2016 he began making sculpture, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. He lives on the St. Joseph River and teaches at Indiana University South Bend where he is Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press.