"Flying ointment SPF-70" and "Flying ointment greases the doors to the vampire confessional"
Flying ointment SPF-70
Saturday light tangles in a rain of willow hair while the country shambles in
eyes razed to inward for missing the shape friends impose after silence
skims tall grasses in a surge of tipsy white butterfly seeding what’s gone
when I need to sit awhile to breathe in feathered songs I thought
Friends whisper color to a house that intends nests
feed secrets to sag the power lines over my head before I was born
afterwards the sunscreen sounds akin to blunt water
But June softens quiet the way roses flash me with tragedy
allergies ash even in smears remembering friends who stop on me
I’m unknown in the edges they sour for protection against tangling light
they carry in their houses inside them seared summer earth
Saturday light rages with an allowance for tipping white butterflies over
I need to sit awhile with them to fracture roses to hurt a rain
the country’s shambles run down the eager leaves
Flying ointment greases the doors to the vampire confessional
I do not like the person gathering behind these words
I do not believe his wound is what he says it is
I see nothing in his chipped little eyes that leads me to believe
There’s no-one to stop you. There’s no-one to hold you back. There’s a stutter when the fan, rotating, endless, returns to spray my bare rump with air. Trapped in the walls, voices we flung there, not caring whether they could be retrieved or not, only relieved of the bulk of words that gathers behind the lips whenever one or the other of us slides into view. There’s no-one to hold you back. There’s the earth’s heat, climbing down from the trees in the dark, filling your mouth with the taste of iron. No-one can stop you, now that between your legs the sun is a yolk and all the summer heat albumen, where the ark was recorded. Believe me, the wound is lead. There are no leaves in my womb which, turning, endless, refer to print small enough to be legally binding. I’m drinking your blood. It’s hot and still moving like the passage of the ark on the face of the deep, turned up in a sloshed smile. It arouses me that you hate my beauty but not enough to reach across the surly chasm of this dim room to switch off the fan. There’s no-one to stop me. They pair off, holding hands. You are everything that can be spoken of. You are the case. In you I place the earth’s heat so it can bleed out from your pores, so I can lick it from your shoulders. Other people are a theory. My womb is no such box, a yolk filling your mouth with the taste of iron. They ascend the plank in pairs.
In this dim room the sound of restless water
talks back to the walls, waiting for the shell to crack
He shows you a bright scar
As a child, on interstate trips, Lewis LaCook thought the moon was following his family’s Econoline van. Upon reaching adulthood, he couldn’t tell whether the truth disappointed or relieved him, so he started writing things down. Some of these things looked like poems, and they may have appeared in journals like Lost And Found Times, Whiskey Tit, Lotus-eater, Synchronized Chaos, and Slope, among others. In 2012 BlazeVOX published Beyond the Bother of Sunlight, a book-length collaboration with Sheila E. Murphy; previously, Anabasis published his book-length poem Cling. Lewis can often be found wandering the wilds of Western New York state with his wife Lindsay. Lewis recommends the Pleistocene Park Foundation.
