Poetry By Mark Fleury

Mark Fleury lives in St. Paul, MN. He has had poems published in Counter-Example Poetics, Of / With: a Journal of Immanent Renditions, Altpoetics, Experiential-Experiential Literature, Altered Scale, Vext Magazine and many others. Mark's fifth volume of poetry, The Eight Wheeled Doorway of Serpent's Head, was published by Scars Publications and Design in March of 2017

Nursing Rivers from Speech’s Sun

Dirt: grass scalped off the suburban sun’s

Landscape, houses dust-swirled like skulls

Bulldozed. And a garden grows photographs,

Lined up like rows of corn; green memories

Full of baby teeth, yellowing to black. The sun thinks space;

And in between, speech is abandoned

And streets are crossed to reach landfills and graves.

Stalked. And I wait for permission to grow.

The sun’s yellow paint stretches my shadow, that

Just quit smoking, across the asphalt as it

Turns around the nervous breakdown

On the other side of speech: bright, the taste

Of withdrawal fills the sun with the smashed

Windows of totaled, rusted solar ships in junkyards. The sun’s open.

The machine brain rises, its chipped yellow

Speech lands on the wedding cakes of widows’ memories.

Too young to be picked, the garden grows clocks

In the photographs, yellowing to green grass of spring.

Licking Up the Grail's Fractured War

Its liquor stores fall down the sides of chins, vampiric,

From mouths of shivering rivers, lips quivering open

For drops of moon tide, glimmering chest caves. Beating

Down the dark walls of the hallway toward living on

The earth floor, vibrating the diamond's sideways

At the base of spines, chess board blood falls, showing

The hall's gauzy moon fog, stretched

Across the labyrinth of my head, and filling

My body with the open mouths of screams;

Makes it hard to get to the window. Speech,

On the ground layered with snakes, must be crossed

At a pyramid's tip to catch the descending

Solar Ship. But the mist on the fog has

The dying beats of star hearts, steeped in

Blue blood leaked from steeples onto

My hands. I raise them up, fingers stretched

Toward the sun's open space high above

The moon at the top of my head. And as Earth

Cracks open its seprateness from the sun

At the base of my spine's pyramid bottom, its

Diamond door is for breath's heart to give

Speech its ground. Birth means the 4D Window

Looks into its own rising vision, beyond compass

And Cross, sunrise in my left hand, sunset in my right.

The Phamacist Peddles Lack

Of pain. The aisles of shelved

Absence of it, bottles of yin

And yang variations, are asymmetrical

With the side-effect tongue bumps.

The Padlock On the Halloween Gate

Is an antenna eye. The mental hospital

Meant entering the sun from its outside.

But the eye vibrates into shape

A mind that sees from within Muse's

Solar womb the bones in my own grave.

The Benches Between the Trees

The light drizzle brightens enough

To mist for rainbows,

Seen from the narrow, barred windows.

Wrists shackled to pure id.

The contents of garbage cans out back

Are inventoried on clipboards, held by

Goggled, white-clad, bare-footed asylum

Security guards speckled with lamb's blood,

For fair distribution to piano players

In attics singing Imagine.

Skeletons of poems are

Boxed individually up there, lined up

Like the crosses on soldiers' graves,

And each one casting the shadow

Of a different hunted animal.

Trying to eat commercials instead of food

The poems are counted, but the math is wrong:

Their yellow, karmic-wheeled, out-of-body

Experiences are rolling down the stairs to

The benches between the trees.