The Book
by Joe Tepperman, Poetry Editor
This bitter scrawl
it's the screams of drowning ants, bites of the box-packed dogs.
At any rate prisoners writing themselves out of the cloisters
spilling teeth into overpass supports and bothering telephone poles with enamel.
The concrete in curing
secretes its curlicued secrets
the more hot bodies
are pressed it
against
and souls attend to provoking blood from stones, whose Manifesto:
"We erode all stepped-on streets
an effort to tap these absorbed poison flumes
flood the filth in cleansing paint and glaze
Our Names about the trodden scraps of sky,
our tired home until
until they're roachjaw etched into
The Book's spine and margins."
