School. Jen Currin

of a living saint.

      What, no questions to ask?

      No dances, then?

      No heaven?

      The Mist Magicians

      Dear, I am a young man.

      Dear, absent-mindedly I …

      Take my lives, take these lines.

      Dear, residents will know how inconvenient …

      Dear, remember the night bus, how we fell in & out of caffeine?

      Jingling with the music you purchased from the clouds.

      An astronaut you called your father.

      How nonsense always made sense.

      That scholar of fairy tales.

      We were nodding-reading. swimming-fucking. & lying-believing.

      How simple it was until we had to finally forget ourselves.

      Right down to what we were drinking & wearing.

      My lips peeling. I had no feelings.

      Disentangling, dear, & so many more people to befriend …

      Will You Write Another Poem Called Meow

      Where will I put this list?

      I can love another face once I learn how.

      These are my remedies; these are my addictions.

      Barely doing my job.

      You are breezing through, grabbing bread,

      hemming a dress & sucking a lemon:

      ‘I need your chequebook & your clothes.’

      Words to utter as I compose heaven: ‘damn you, thank you.’

      One January I walked in the woods at night.

      In a clearing, I saw an owl.

      After that, I became honest.

      Haven’t had a cold or a headache since.

      When your eyes meet mine

      don’t forget the vulnerability of that open space.

      Friendships (Unlikely)

      I wrote this dream to address the problem.

      The problem was my dreams.

      I am responsible for the fantasy –

      just as I knowingly paid for coffee with a counterfeit twenty.

      Another friend is ‘glowing.’

      ‘The wind is kind.’ (She said?)

      After giving up everything –

      how blue the sky.

      Clean hopelessness –

      not getting anything from anyone else. (a lie.)

      She was testing/teasing/teaching me –

      like the men joking about feasting on grain-fed pigeons.

      He was both fat & rich in the parable,

      single-handedly keeping the patriarchy alive.

      Asking & asking what to do.

      She reminded me that I could write stories,

      could be struck by lightning & live.