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10/1/10

Sommer Browning


photo by Matt Walker

Work
At the party I can’t work. I pull from the bookshelf
a biography of wives. It is brief.

I look up ‘event horizon’
reapply my silly wardrobe:

evening, spring, needles, peas,
the sun, if it was born stuck and freaky,

and the earth, the day we married.
I just can’t work. The pier is in pieces.

The boats pulling the other boats say yes
along their watery routines,

over abysses like they’re footholds.
A bird is the invitation you say yes to.

The world’s busses may be late. It might have snown.
And the earth, sold out of wreathes. Wasn’t it?



breed
a house is an employment of trees, a crowd is a path to a door.

if this is a stage
then ask if this is a stage.

the light of a cigarette outed by snowflakes, no privacy
in the crowd when it’s burning.

if we feed the sun we give away velocity.
i dogear the daisy blooming against the clapboard.

nothing will happen
we tell the sun,

if it does
watch me catch it.

it’s your ice, the dust in your gun when i rush the stage,
if this is only a stage.

can i build it for you?
the carpenter frames us in destroys movement like a photograph.

can i build this house for you?
a ring circumscribes an answer on my hand.


Sommer Browning writes poems in Denver. She is the co-editor of Flying Guillotine Press, a handmade poetry chapbook press. Either Way I'm Celebrating, her first book of poems, is coming out with Birds, LLC in early 2011.

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