Paul Koniecki - Two poems

on the nickel block

where we go to see
about my best friend’s medicine

and she explains how the
city has been extraordinarily slow

in filling the holes on
this street for months and

months again she tells me
how much safer she feels

there than in the fast
neighborhoods how tall beautiful and

immature her son is for
his age and i notice

lately that construction cones have
become as thin as apricot

stalagmites marking time as nothing
but brave young titian colored

brachium punching out and up
like any part of a

bird’s mouth rootstock reaching for
a breath of finished air

all they want alive we
turn around in an abandoned

parking lot behind the next
pile of broken orange teeth

i wait for you to reseal
your blunt with mother’s spit




Some things are better free

Nothing happens in America until
someone sells a ware and a truck or
train delivers it unlike all my favorite

songs that start squarely in the middle
of the end. Our first Winter together I
read up on how the swine flu begins how

train tracks run straight as someone
else’s scar or semi-trailers turn more than
new emotion. I ended up learning about

the lifecycles of other pandemics. A
girl with no left shoulder and a boy
with no right pinky toe barrel down

the long asphalt hill of Fort Worth
Avenue in a little shopping cart.
Pulling the pins out of your coconut

oil coated curls is an exercise in love.
I’d like to make my own pencils and hope.
I am a blind forager scavenging for ether

or graphite and chance I have told this
well enough you’ll stop reading now and
ride along.



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