Patrick Kurth
An obi opens bare alone,
Some window to the body
Wearing a cicatrice necklace
No hand can unclasp.
Twilight parts in violet fits
Shadow plateletes weep and stick
A cruel look draws back from the collar
Solace’s dressing unwinds.
Fly-paper lips glisten with penance and
A remnant of pollen
That hardens to resin.
Did evenings always course in so?
Slivers of sleight
Slip inflamed under skin.
There’s no difference in the babbles
Of vespula and apis.
The sickle welt is dressed in the frock
Shred of the cur who plunged a syringe
And sucked out your nectar with such desperation
To swizzle and guzzle an ambrosia of scorn.
On the edge of a gnarled fen
A grove of one elegy
Shorn by the wind
There hangs coiled a single, impossible apple.
Pocket fodder litters the radicle
Pennies, pencaps, boars’ heads, a
Whatever homage of seeds
Jotted in the lee of a grave.
The lie’s all a mottle
Stigma and style, shell and self,
Plein air painting we might’ve
Planted instead
That plummets to earth
To nourish the worms
And the loam still to come.
***
Patrick Kurth lives in Berlin, where he helps to run ‘Bridge’, a print and performance series featuring the work of local poets. His own writing can be read in past and forthcoming issues of Third Point, Panoply, Red Flag, Soundings East, River River, and the FU Review.