Mike Wall

Where Is The Manual

here we overheat & melt
telekinetically wobble
severed limb
patient with the ax
we hold daylight
underneath layers of skin
seek cover
gut & skin
paint our eyes shut
accelerating toward impact
casting inconsequential incantations
with inconsistent dance steps
chainsaw touching chainsaw
bleed into plastic bags
lick away sickness
I covet how our skin
turns transparent
when we ensnare
I devote myself
to our pact
to stand in between headlights
to hang bones from twine
we remain on the floor
nocturnal blood on the door
a cold room
in one another

10

diverged two
kindling pictures
except anvil I
downward radiance and
mosaic to hostility
our abomination
exchange unnerve
journey arsenic planning
procession rigorous
waning clown jaundice
spite the collective
torches throng we
carving touch
we trebuchet
landfill for lair
bathe the I
specified soft
deviant am

Full Of

started but exploded guts everything
wrote your name in my bile
I fortress incorrect
you are useless light
we appear in doorway violence
head full blind injured wax way
nothing appealing about will
lead disapprovingly insular
inaccurate when guided
I aorta with gun powder
doctor depict you inanimate
diorama of our broken spears
out of body future
reverberating soup fields
scalping love showdown
list of crossbow commands
rotting amulet
forced as slugs
half resurrected
and dragged into anonymous
full radical hatchet generation
we catapult apart
free war for wake
emptiness boils full fallout
disannul star charting
exposure acceptance
shockwave putrid you bide ocean current
I constrict full of unrest
a dune obelisk
decapitations never absolution
I non man
you full right
evolution some foreign

Mike Wall is a MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Program for Poets and Writers. His poems have appeared in Jellyfish Magazine, iO: A Journal for New American Poetry, and Interrupture a Journal of Poetry and Art. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.