A Tonalist Poetry Feature

Taylor Brady

Maps, Jokes and Heavy Armor

for Yedda Morrison & Helena Gough

Landscape as an Alien Quantity

“Not again”


— found the on-ramp as if by fate

in no capacity and unsigned
but them, whom our speech decides...

you turn to face the wall when a subject steps forth

¶

Because each fold and bump and wen made sense
you turn to face the wall when the law takes on flesh


Kinesis of the titled silhouette
but not again “not again” this violence
done directly to the face with scissors
cues amnesia for who made thee Lilly
or Pfizer turn east to face the wall
where nameless rhizomes grow


Ordinary is the greased chute out of the municipal regs

and ordinary unbound leaves the handbill worker dumped

butt-ugly as we recognize each other on the bus
you turn disoriented and destructive animal to face the wall

¶

They titrate frat pranks into international exchange
your non-parental guardians a final outpost barring
whom a desert separated cop from code by which
you turn to face the wall and clip the drunk internal monologue

¶

Meanwhile look who’s less than predicates click
the counter in the dusty basin topsoil south
and inland to the cotton belt you turn to
face the barricado shores hydraulics up
against hydrarchy on the deck and in the hold



                          the gleaming needle compassed
                          in organum’s primal organelle

¶

Patrols vigilant at midnight through wide-angle infrared
heard rustling of the green, green grass imported wholesale

¶

A specific mineral dry weight of ease means no one
turns to face the wall in absent wandering conceptually
nonplussed at what my tongue is doing when the pages
turn a different face to show the verso is the same



We wonder how new combinations ever held
the migratory route’s half-century across the interstate
in miniature’s the image having come

to single ends

¶

From thirty thousand feet the looseleaf nest
reproduces to the limit of the irrigated field
yet what comes next remains unthought remains

Taylor Brady lives in San Francisco. He is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently Occupational Treatment (2006), and Yesterday’s News (2005), and is the co-author with Rob Halpern of Snow Sensitive Skin (2007). Recent poems, beginning to accumulate under the title Pamphlets, Rants, Tracts & Ballads, attempt a series of extrapolations, re-readings, and polemics with and against the grain of the writers and musicians who instruct him. He is active in the Nonsite Collective, and has recently edited the collected essays of Will Alexander for 2010 publication.