Chévere

Abstract

Chévere Alex Lemon (bio) In calling this born of a mouth We promise a blossoming of tears A paradise of wreckages: therefore handcuffed & hidden We are deer-like: split open & down Lightning flourishes our faces—diamond-lipped & always ruined For example, the body falling inside this body For example, a pail filled with manicured hands Here then is amplification. Here they come with something in their mouths & thought is limited by the crust that hardens around the lip of bottles [End Page 155] The harmony-throated are joy The rest are knife One minute for tender & glory No more By night we know it for what is stirring in the dumpster & now it is the long hemlock away The intimate x that doesn’t y I then understand me buried in garden To this we say needle above & eye to eye In contrast to buried-in-this-hole-for-a-very-long-time This, it is told, came with a whole lot of high fives And the more & the faster, the more real, the hotter Which means that here, anything is possible By touching, a thing becomes our someday-electricity-head By eternity we understand the man pointing, the woman collecting water That pours from a slit-open cactus with an overturned crab-shell & in this anything-is-possible world we only exist when whirling to go We draw it all with our dirty tongues, the stumps of our missing hands [End Page 156] Alex Lemon Alex Lemon’s poetry collections include Hallelujah Blackout (Milkweed Editions) and Mosquito (Tin House). A memoir is forthcoming from Scribner. Among his awards are a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He co-edits LUNA: A Journal of Poetry and Translation with Ray Gonzalez and frequently contributes to the Bloomsbury Review. Copyright © 2009 University of Nebraska Press