sonnet for use value

fabric [noun] the word originally denoted a building, later a machine, the general sense being ‘something made’

For instance, The Burj Khalifa costs 1.5 billion to erect. I could buy a sports team or three White Houses, a private island of my own reckoning fail. The point is to show you how much I love you despite our losses. The spires give us permission, the edifice dazzling in this poor-light. How many skeletons have you wished you could flesh back, revive? It floors me to know how much.

failed sonnet: the money feeds us

Because language is always missing, our mouths hunger for its origin aloud. I buy the slang for money with money: mint, cheddar, bread. I am bringing home the bacon. I am building something delicious. If I were not caught in the teeth of the world’s gate, I would laugh and laugh at our misfortune. I cannot afford it. On Sundays, my mother would cook bacon and eggs and feed us with her labor. She was building something delicious for us to sink our cogs into. We would sit around the table, share stories and laugh. And laugh. And laugh and laugh.

how to do it j.r.

These days I am wiser than I was before. I put caps on the ketchup bottles Before I shake

Like a dog at the vet.

You look good in a hat

I say to myself

Wearing a hat like a stone

Wearing a hat.

But anyway I’d like to express The opposite of that. Drive this old truck

Through the what-have-yous

Of birthdays and Thursday Night movies. That means turning Away from myself

And toward mollusks

And things artists notice. They don’t even do anything. They just sit there and breathe.

c. francis fisher

Afterlife

Once the cat was dead, we drove to Sunset Park and ordered roast duck heads from a Sichuanese restaurant. The best way to eat them: yank the bottom beak till the tongue comes loose. I squished eyeballs between my molars. When my grandmother was alive, she made lamb chops.

Let me gnaw the bones clean and throw them over my shoulder. Other things I learned as a child: French, flossing, fractions. That I am not, in fact, a horse. The grass I took for lunch turned up green and foamy on the carpeted floor. Last night, I was the one who found the cat panting in the tub. You became convinced of the need to take the poor thing on the roof so she could see the sky, then wring her neck with your bare hands. I would have let you kill her if we had a shotgun but we live in Brooklyn.

The cat certainly would have let you. She loved you desperately, in the way only dying things can.