Atlas & Alice | Issue 2 Winter 2014
Man from Shells
– after Gaston Bachelard and Bly
i. Temporal Man juts from the conch blows sour notes of command with a light flakey coat over fish mail soaks up the soy ginger sauce and down the gullet swinging his Pygmy paring knife—the crosshatch on the pig’s rump a snare of beauty and spiral cut
with the passive spite of the ammonites he centaurs from the buckskin lair—exposed now his command module floating well behind him Sheppard pulls down his glare shield like a third eyelid like a blindfolded lobster freshet in the water the temperature rises and all that heat from the cement reflects not love but the industry of Love and looking over the shoulder coyly one hand invites the other to spin in space—two terns and an ocean—a cortex lying on its back between them before into the garlic butter and down. ii. we writhe from the hair in our horns—rise from the home, the spike, the body a mask the lash of this whipline self.
These things voiced—a falling tower crushes—we so permeable that act carefree: are powerful
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