Brad Flis lives in Toronto, Canada, and frequents the good places.

 

Gaelic Sister, Unattempted

 

elocution:

O Rooter! O Wallower in ponds!

You oppose the richest moment. You look to imitate

what was imitatable, to imitate decision.

 

Ecclesiastes:

What is left but this method of warming,

a sound we judge upon and the frame it teases apart,

like a shard opening the throat, or a shibboleth?—

 

ecce signum:

Between glyphs, discarded, my tongue ribbons

after that vital third. (Not merely the monument,

nor the monumental, but a marker of the totem’s dementia)—

 

enclitic:

My hand is your hand, my leg your arm

as though the fixture were a fiction or vice-wiersza:

junk DNA, we are redundant.

 

eclogue:

‘Who is your father?’ ‘Rotting stomach

is your father, an apparition

open sod exhales.’ ‘It is pleasing?’ ‘It is constant.’

 

etcetera :

I am a fruit container. I was born

of thirsting walnut shells,

of unending. dot. dot. dot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dressingest Man in New Delhi

 

He is the colour corn

resembles, immaterial like this tunic

climber; his sign is less than.

 

Truly, his mail is gunmetal, a gentle phallus.

 

There waft cooling vapours

often in his Tupperware.

 

(His gods, like mint, bleed tobacco juices

into his spout, where the tongue and Jumna intersect,

and thus Red, and thus a portent of the guitar

we invented in our sleep, as we slept.)

 

Vines grow from his head and disappear

into the empty, yellow ceilings.

 

His belt is nearly in the beer.

 

He carries many mugs, not many mugs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Sorrowful Things

 

Ach, how moonless and impure the unleashing

robes memorize their galleons and sea salts.

Ach, the mild swan repeats its wings against

my dull face, I am drawn towards its wings.

 

they dance in their own name?

the small rain down can rain?

Rows of water pipe ignore them—

 

A stranger carries itself

in coptic jars; white birds feasting

upon flushed plums and the breasts

of their own trajectile force.