Beside Some Free Range White Chickens

Installation applause
nightly removal
of pen caps, masterpiece.
Images not taking part,
images for a forty-year
merge. Shiny satellite jacket
and the way his shoe
fit. Star charts
composed entirely
in purple crayon, table-
cloths, watered down
collections, an interior
with daffodils purring.
Beside wet cement.
Paw prints.
Beside the falling
precipitation
darkness hangs ripe.
There's no answer.
He didn't think
of poetry as a booby
trap, rather a sky filled
with sparrows falling
like dried suction cups.
Murmurs disconnect
as memories change
color, lock themselves
away within the coziness
of a brachial cough.
The footnotes
of a sex life
filed between
the sound of knife
on vegetable
and curtains closing.
I feel like glazed
rain water, and time
leftover has become
a rented interest.












Noah Falck teaches Language and Thought at Northridge Local Schools. His poems appear or are forthcoming in journals such as Gulf Coast, LIT, Combatives, Absent, Word for/Word, Eucalyptus, and others. He lives in Dayton, Ohio.






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