{"id":3774,"date":"2013-04-16T02:57:47","date_gmt":"2013-04-16T02:57:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sporkpress.com\/?p=3774"},"modified":"2013-04-16T02:57:47","modified_gmt":"2013-04-16T02:57:47","slug":"many-poems-by-joe-hall-pt-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/2013\/04\/16\/many-poems-by-joe-hall-pt-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Many Poems by Joe Hall pt. 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

A MONSTER IS A HIDEOUS KIND OF LOCK<\/strong>
\n 
\n 
\nThere are burning heaps of dead horses
\nIn the literary wind belly-filling with rancid stellar dust
\nA horse eaten by a grand piano
\nA horse\u2019s skin sloughed by radiation, sticky muscles splashing
\nThrough flooded fields of rice
\nArabian horses with broken backs, struggling to stand or even shoo
\nThe flies and maggots in the bombed out hippodrome\u2019s shell
\nOr the frozen war dead in a cart harnessed to a drought horse
\nThat is also lying down in the mud to die
\nAnd when from an act of science the dead walk this earth
\nThe horses will walk first, hot breath jetting
\nThrough their long skulls
\nWe will ride these horses
\nThen race them, find them hateful and kill them
\nFeeling regret in our broken faces
\nWe will impale ourselves on their long diseased ribs
\nHoping to become something else, catching light
\nSomething like turds
\nOr fabulously iridescent oil
\nShining with its exhaustion
\n 
\n_______________________________
\nTRAILER PARK BLIZZARD, Feb 10, 2010<\/strong>
\n 
\n 
\nI would live in the country, I would live in the city
\nI pray to Jesus in a duck blind with my rifle
\nI pray to Jesus at dinner with friends with a 3rd
\nKind of genital, I live in a condo on a
\nFarm for republican rage, I update my blog
\nIn a coffee shop in a civil war prison staffed
\nBy green confederate skeletons
\nThere are tall pines and sand pouring from the windows
\nOf tall buildings, there are necks blowing out cones
\nOf blood at the table at Applebees
\nThere are beautiful heads with flowers on their lips
\nDrifting down the Susquehanna\u2014
\n 
\n______________________________
\nRETURN VISIT, HOSPITAL<\/strong>
\n 
\nfor David who is my father<\/em>
\n 
\nOn the sandy banks, I am reclining
\nas the winch of a dredger clanks
\nscooping up locks of bone, the three chambers
\n 
\nof a heart turning colorless. In the evening
\nI play a computer game
\nthat is called Don\u2019t Shit Your Pants<\/em>
\n 
\nwhere you are bald, pink, and wearing an undershirt.
\nYou try not to shit your pants.
\nI used to love Paul Blackburn. Here he is:
\n 
\nsmoking, he eats an orange and stares at the sea
\non a balcony in Salonica
\nbefore throat cancer kills him.
\n 
\nHe is a version of you, David, of course.
\nFunded by the state, I file my life down,
\nblow a hill into powder. All that the chisel leaves,
\n 
\na reaching without sleep\u2014mud snails
\nclimbing green reeds\u2014living in
\na rotten house in a trailer park
\n 
\nin the knocking winds, waterspouts
\nrising, mixing, whether I am watching or not
\nyour wife, her body that does not hold water
\n 
\nsix floors above the ground
\nin the cauterizing space
\nof the cancer ward.
\n 
\nDavid, I am ready to believe what your wife believes:
\nunder the final tidal wave of flame
\nour body waits for us
\n 
\nbut it is in stupid coldness, spasmodic,
\ncircling its own death, weeping over it.
\nIn the binding labor of sleep
\n 
\nI will believe, and belief is the wind
\nwhere I am naked on the trailer park beach
\n 
\nand a hand is upon me, David.
\nIt is the wind, and the wind is a sculpture of time.
\nO terror!
\n 
\n__________________________________
\nJoe Hall<\/strong> was born in the woods and is devoted to Cheryl. He is the author of The Devotional Poems (Black Ocean 2013). With Chad Hardy he wrote The Container Store Vols. I & II (SpringGun 2012). His poems, fiction, book reviews, and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Octopus, HTMLGiant, The Colorado Review, and elsewhere.
\n  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A MONSTER IS A HIDEOUS KIND OF LOCK     There are burning heaps of dead horses In the literary wind belly-filling with rancid stellar dust A horse eaten by a grand piano A horse\u2019s skin sloughed by radiation, sticky muscles splashing Through flooded fields of rice Arabian horses with broken backs, struggling to stand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2],"tags":[13,14,49,50,104],"class_list":["post-3774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-things","tag-black-ocean","tag-black-ocean-press","tag-joe-hall","tag-joe-hall-poems","tag-spork"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}