Jordan Davis

Why We Fight

You have what I want

You’re eating my lunch

You’re stepping on my toes

Pass the idiot already

Let the maniac by

You stole my joke

Silence or electrical hum

You can’t do it all

It doesn’t have to be done

I’m hungry

Lonely angry tired

I get so tired
unlike the rest of the world
I’m like a rock
if a rock were really good
at getting tired

I remember the poets who wrote and wrote
and the ones who read and read
and the ones who talked and talked

The light in the afternoon
is ideal for living rooms—
and no one there to see it

Made in a meadow,
called forth, a smiling wished-for
apparition, an occasion

The fuzz and scruff
headlong in a daze

A feeling like a drink of scotch,
like closing your eyes and breathing in
just before beginning to speak

Made in a meteor,

skin rippling under the auto-dry
like summer grasses under a helicopter

Every universal library
so far
has disappeared
taking civilization with it

On a scale of 1 to 5
rate your satisfaction with this poem

there appears to be no dreaming in space,
only clipping coupons
for the next war

A glowing egg
doesn’t sound delicious.
The tongs, the tongs.
All but one.

Drummer biographies
stutter along,
mentioned in passing.
The tongs, the tongs.

A lifetime supply,
don’t that sound delicious,
Stuttering John,
all but one.

The lighting supply
mentioned in passing
in a thicket of wires.
The tongs, the tongs.

Let the train roll by my buttered roll,
and the radio towers pulse through the trees.
Let everyone ask for what we know will come

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Jordan Davis’s second book, Shell Game, was published by Edge Books in September 2018. He is working on a third collection, Amazing Savings Distribution Center, and he lives in Brooklyn.