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.