Pearson

Jeff Pearson

Two Poems

Night Games Like Relieval

Pastoral baptismal fonts have dried,
slurped up by sun beams, who want to be a—
Why didn’t I spend more time
with mushroom haired Stacy Little?
When I found out snagging was illegal
in fishing, I began releasing the suckers
to their ground feeding holes. Coalesce

she had described our relationship, and
finger puppets would have been better
than scented markers, better than edible
play-doh, homemade, returning to adulthood.
Dickolus took her out for tea, maybe overgrown
for the playground, purple dino dedicated
to a fallen child, and with two ACL surgeries,
why don’t my knees rust?

She broke out from the semen, the
way I do from children’s sunscreen,
shapes and patterns, manic
at 8 o’clock, her describing the liberation
of poetry forms to her mother, the
coast from 65 to 45mph, and in relieval, jumping
over tire fires. Stacy Little remade chronology;

situating abandonment with the gall bladder
removal and lust as under 18 as
the misanthropes of secondary school,
where they bust snowdrifts with
their cars, where litmus tests of dehydrated
wrestlers, later spitting jolly rancher phlegm, have

shock collars for amsey divey, lil’ wrong yard?
Full up on back and forth’s,
she reasoned with a still small voice
when we found the box of onions
dropped by a semi
on top of fish creek summit.
What shall we look for in the rain?
She wept so well that time; the

foam of the fire hose out of her eyes
rotted the grass in the old football field,
where they jump off the cement wall
in skateboard acid drops.

She lays people down in tanning beds,
seals them up like hot dogs, and
when will I wreck into the car wash wall,
the only accident I remember.
Glum imaginations came; then the hot
springs, the spreading of a vaccine

agent she thought with her permanent leg
cuts and better yet, let it trickle down
into the pebble floor, bred like Archeybacteria
to be found by retired science teachers
who read Henry Miller. And everyone

sat around the pools knowing you are chosen
to cure them, to free them from all
ailments, and this is all imaginary. And
then the national guard member spoke of
perks; later, she told her mom, “I’m
joining,” and her mom said, “it’s not right for
everyone.” Her house felt like the celestial
kingdom she said, where those endowed visit and

for some reason tonight, I feel the
dead; massive connectiveness I feel,
the winter passes
reserved for residents, and I
almost hit a deer in the fog, the preemptive
resonance, more deaths avoided.
In Stacy Little’s wilderness, the
basis for psychosis, she is
a wombat punk windmilling
Don Quixotes in mosh pits.

Meth-od

1. Tries to smoke

in the bathroom and is caught by
the overwhelming lack of diffusion,
the potentially locked-down environment.
She & speed, remain with
the dosage of rust, basalt rocks
hold too much iron, for the dash up
the quarry: Hell’s Half Acre. All
her two lovers weren’t afraid,
liquefied, rescued by their
gallop and pace-along, the way
they manage to not steal TVs from
their parents mid-attack. The way they
don’t throw fits over mis-labeled piano-
notes extending through the alphabet,
past G. What helps the noise: dishwashing,
the open space foot-falls
surmount to a chert killing, allowed
to play an Axis and Allies board game
with Manchurian, bayonets-
above-the-head, figurines:
get lit with tea leaves and snorts
of pure cane sugar, photographic
memory, so piss now on newsprint.

2. Loses her bra,

her little A-cup black grasp
found-out by the piano-player
elegantly fingering the keys.
She remains locked,
but a member of the buffalo club
reward system, free
to play the geisha slot machine,
shares with both male and female.
What type of creeper?
Double-barrel sling-shot,
dial tones of family members, stuck
in freedom, wrench for the girl’s comfort.
Barn owl paintings
form on the wood canvases
death omens above
the payphones, she gathers.
She colors with chewed crayons,
(commando style)
an elk trapped in a cathedral.
Toothbrushes re-color her teeth.

3. An eye for the bartending pharmacist

hopes he won’t ask for yesterday’s nicotine patch,
but lets her double-shoulder it.
Sometimes on the morning grounds’ walks,
(Would she still go?)
her bra is seen flying from the tops
of a sub-alpine fir, a flag for the
the discoloration of the hospital,
metronome sway; but liberated, the bra
remains like a top-of-the-ski-lift underwear
decorated tree.

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