Marty Cain

POETRY IS TIME THEFT PT. 1

Bound to the field

The salt crystal lodged in cheese-brain matter

I milk immanent motion

And bless my windpipe with it

I desired peace

And wanted the resonant feeling

Of your body convulsing once more on my hand

And the smell of fresh horsemeat hung on rafters

A floor rode through me

Your vision blurred

Dirty gym socks stuffed into my throat

On my hands and knees I’m drugged

Wrapped in cellophane and hemp rope

I start to gag

I am sock, I am quivering

Now stuck outside it

The molecules reshape

& follicles sweat into water

Eyes dangle cartoon-like from the sockets

That’s all, that’s all

A voice on the speaker sung

I wanted peace

FABLE

The song hits the zither

And the song is changed

I woke up filled with horniness

And deciduous rage

I WANTED SEMEN AND THEY WANTED DEATH

Bound to the field

And burying key stakeholders with a fucking railroad spike

The shovel broke on ice

Bereft of sleep

Everyone deserves pleasure

Except you

Not you

Snow coated the city

We ran out of genial money

The bus slid down the hill filled with masked bodies

A blustering thing with sweating thoughts

In the garage freezer the meat hummed on

Our phones filled with hotties & endless bad news

Fuck you

Fuck you

You fascist pieces of shit

The poem fogged over

Marty Cain is the author of three books of poetry and hybrid writing, most recently The Prelude (Action Books, 2023). Individual works appear in Best American Experimental Writing, Fence, Denver Quarterly, mercury firs, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. A critical monograph, Making Places: Rural Infrastructure, Media, and D.I.Y. Poetic Community, is under contract with Clemson University Press. He lives in Ithaca, NY, where he works for Cornell University Library and co-edits Garden-Door Press.