Read More: A brief Q&A with Lawrence Bridges
Your Goddess Characteristics
The one I’d most rather lunch with would be
Lady Charlene if only to hear her take on
Next-Gen clown-dressing and obtain a foretaste
of her terms of rebellion lurking beneath her own dress code.
But Suzie will do. I charge my apps with affection
and encouragement – you get a free lunch
playing the old sage even though you pay to hear
from these daughters who will soon run the world
as you properly mourn the meat show passing
currently in these lanes – you can’t digitize womens’
labor nor commodify their love. They drive
their fingers into the soft earth and make themselves
beautiful at all times. Is there a better humanity?
Their opposites, mostly not of earth, we mourn
death itself and shag order and worship hoarding
like tightwad generals, steins in hand, laughing
before death tomorrow, not for a cause but for
them and their daughters who hold the shebang
together with bows and post-its and doesn’t
matters because time is a plaything
and we are old years before we are young.
These Aren’t The Thoughts
These aren’t the thoughts of Needles, CA, of dusty bandstand shade, of staying all day inside to escape the heat. These are walking around thoughts, knowing what you’re doing thoughts, getting things done to the good. You move to a house where it’s cool and bring a woman in. You hunt and eat what you kill, cooperate. This done while decades pass as centuries in these cities which were built mostly by the dead. Your movement inside empty time is shredding everything nearby to loosen the laughing fabric and seize its shapes though you live in a house built by a dead man.
Crater Lake
Fête it. Do it. Streak it to me
from Fullerton! I hear popping in my pockets
from coconuts and ants while the rising and
and falling of tides delights like wooshing wind
as it decrescendos (causing vibrations to hit
the blinds). Fast motion to daylight,
window ladders from trucks to paint the house […]
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Shade of Night
The escape from fieldwork and the great
expanse of grain and time is the dark
where I can’t see. This was my out.
Fieldwork hastens its own end, but I turn soil
where rows circle, a spiral field, a field
through trees and water and Singapore. […]
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Lawrence Bridges’ poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums (Red Hen Press, 2006), Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Brownwood (Tupelo Press, 2016). You can find him on IG: @larrybridges
Read More: A brief Q&A with Lawrence Bridges