Issue 20: Rob Halpern
All Roof No House
Calling back my dead to sheds in
Stately yards the cut’s still fresh
No one would think to resurrect
My theft downs dawn & cinders
Like his eyes comport my beams
In you my time will be yr labor
No sky opens living meshes shiver
Trees go dead the dead go dig
- ing down my body’s conquered
High above yr head they hang no
Eyes compost his beams in mine
Remains still air inters whatever
- ’s real evicts no place to posit
Still ash waste & consequence
Whose hollowed mouths my in
- sides sing it out to you as if
To vomit this I am
— only I when you cut here.
Bird Crave
No license to refuse this love whose names call out from the hooded hole
My face in you becomes so near a distance where clarity’s all blasted i
- sotopic quavering a fazing eros yr conceptual remains beyond this blind
Bird of consequence a concrete drift obscures the light we see by
Ourselves being no light at all a fall
- ing out of light even as yr eyes disjoin
My selves abstract inconstant rates inflate the sun could be
A turbine a stone bone moss birds crave conversion too inside the fault
My poem runs to silence slows these things
Become us truer names than ours we
Can’t hear any more
— this waste thru which our matter rises.
How to Liberate yr Body from Social Necessity
after Martha RoslerHa ido usted al mercado? yup, ‘estregue’ means ‘scrub’ the dome
- stic foundation of every house where the bodies don’t
Wash up here and everyone’s entitled to a beautiful interior
— so aroused by my birthright.
Talking Points
My work is one of gluing things becoming false a profligate
Skin amassing voice interrogation channels gluing useful lips
To mouth sublime oblivions lurk in things value hides not being
One w/ our optics my latifundia as if the problem were retinal
I’m screaming out out vile jelly! the occupier’s in my eye being
A property of luster lipping & deceased little lichee nuts this is
The work of food vacancies linking hands perceived externally
As hate touching mouths I can’t remember things but his limbs
Ingrown for channel jamming bodies clog no frame as hot lust
Fans sheer weight the earth imagines loins patch nerves drills stones
Exchange for skin what pure emotion stalls at the place I pucker in
- to public feeling moderation conceals extremist cores my heart
Being one a puny mushroom nothing can refer to what’s lurking
Inside diminishing fields of prospect I get lost becoming sound
After periods of gross decay fish turn belly up in schools killed
By abstractions nobody made like his fibula nobody made any no
- ise as if the future were hanging on sounds no one hears move
- ments internalizing grinding down uncertain work the body
It goes lewd & limps the world entrenched inside dark rumors
Illuminating roads excessively lit for safety lives in market share
My vision security measures like prefab bulletproof periscopic
Infantry officiating form fed cognition annals chronicles all sent
- ient space whose culverts streaming sewage glows w/ such
Immediacy into which I keep coming without making contact.
Rock Song
Being nothing seen this rock no place no
Eye to follow things erase this common
Hole in sense sinks cleaves things scales can’t
Sense insensate force what’s living here and
Dying not to die breathing things produce
This rock no point to vanish splits no bird
Can name what’s got no name and shudders
In this fateless space no nominal blow no
Relation in relation no history tho in history
Lost not seeing nothing but the fateful force
By which nothing can’t be named it names
Things useless the question being use itself
A unit of measure in the economic organ
- ization of dreamboats whose raptures de
- scribe what nothing resembles this feels like
Rock a place no site can split screens birds fly
Motionless cresting zones points things name
No event the distance jets one bird from sky
A thrush beyond this loss to lose what goes
— withdrawn into the square.
Rob Halpern lives between San Francisco and Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he teaches at Eastern Michigan University and Huron Valley Women’s Prison.
