NO FOREST

Bending to the image
narrow desert slim chance
rusting leftovers
noxious side eye
plentiful instructions
lost in the footnotes
warped nails frustrating removal
climbing out of the escape
lifted into the trap
an appeal rotting on the floor
stepped on by avoiding shoes
she knew what to do
just waited too long
was always hoping I would get it
get it she thought
one thing only thing
she got wrong
get it she thought
hopeless fucking face
in the mirror
I always knew that 
spitting into the sink
my only connections
networking into something
to keep the bills at bay
my string of saliva
to the hole in the room
going on and on
about damned elephants
when there are holes
all over your dying 
sack of a figure
dragging this sack
bending to the image 
narrow desert slim chance


- Max Stoltenberg

FEARED AND DUST

I throw the ball of paper crumpled in my fist toward the ceiling toward the crotch of the sky between knees of contemplated non-existence wiped from lips that split and bleed fragments of reasons for leaving reasons for staying the stuck manifesto translated for menopausal figures in the corner launching shit across the rug despite the after effects of not smoking for so long so many hours so many days across the rug despite to spite myself and my maternal silence can she not hear me as I stare into her reflection as I drive eyes on the road as I die as I want to as I sit here bathed in red covered in green pissing yellow over most of myself my figures in the corner launching shit across the rug puzzles on the floor pieces kicked about the room mixed with hair and toenails and dead skin meaning for a greeted enemy sharing too much too little in common suppose you breach the birth suppose you say what is on your mind and find out it was never yours where did that line go wandering into the desert the one that divided us and rotted into that canyon between our thoughts. 

She looked over the top of the partition and concluded she must have gone to the bathroom in her cubicle never got around to making it in time that was always the issue when one neglected to consider sharp office supplies and their craving internal organs for the puncturing random aspects of equations she could never copy down the way she had seen her write them down in fading colors always yanking drawers open and listening to the sound of metal drowning out the joking ignorance stitched into sweaters or skirts that lay at the bottom of a smelling cubicle.

"You are a disease."
"I forget which one my parents named me after, but I don't think it got translated accurately."
"You are an illness."
"I've relied more on excusing myself and slipping outside for a meandering into the distance. Didn't realize the two halves of the world meet in a vanishing point that disappears once you get around to it."
"You are filth."
"I am flushed with embarrassment."
"You are a contagion."
"I've never been one to overestimate my influence."
"You are a waste."
"She says very little now. Her voice is like sun tea that has been forgotten on the back patio. It's what she'd been picking up on. What was missing from every photograph or couldn't be erased when a couple of dimensions happen to be so thick. That night out what made the place our favorite it was only the appetizers they had bruschetta with sauteed mushrooms and zucchini sticks. Ruined by how he deformed what she wanted to say every future moment to take place in an empty room prostrate on a dark block."

Bag without handles
devoid of seeds
the moon rises
caught in the mesh
of surreal variations
on the day
swamped by the waves
of past residue
memories pasted
together in the septic tank


- Max Stoltenberg