BJ Soloy
—
[Inaudible Question]
Rain on the windows sounds like mice
on their wheel. The world’s song
has become noise, but not like Eno
or Thurston Moore or Laurie Anderson
or Cage noise—like wet mouse noise,
like one whose ear starts to sing.
The twenty-first century gets darker but never
dark. Sleepy but never asleep. Asleep
but never sober. “I haven’t slept,” I whisper
to you through the rodent noise of your
tinnitus. “The twenty-first century
is a singing ear.”
Dear Floor, I am Falling
for Skoog
This expensive dog the color of a pitted-out white button-down
barks at I suppose the grass. “Ma’am, I’ve named your Bichon Frisé
First World Problems.” I can’t stop repeating myself, an analogue
tape loop, a prog rock riff, my excuses ornate as a fall-down bus station
’s tin ceiling pressed in a time of boom. My attention pushes me around
like a shopping cart and the afternoon takes a turn, like Cindy
asking me out to lunch & then propositioning me with a nutraceutical
pyramid scheme. People used to say I looked like Jake Gyllenhaal
or the guy from Shameless or at least my brother; now they just ask
if I’m ok. I haven’t prayed in twenty-seven years, just barely long enough
for my lack of faith to have blossomed & died at the height of its popularity.
Tonight, what I don’t pray for are our recently dead. Rather, it’s the mess
they left behind. When left behind, I hope to be pretty enough that my image
is used to sell shit that people don’t want or need but maybe deserve. Yes,
it’s the same Cindy from earlier. Yes, Ed is done with dog poems. Dear Floor,
you’re a car that’s all headlights. Last night was empty orchestra night
at the Uptown & my morning throat’s a littered dance floor
of gin & Bowie. This is a one-lane bridge. Dear Floor, let’s be adults
about this. The Mississippi’s the color of a puddle from an overnight
flash flood pooled inside a corpse itself stuffed into a rusty shed. A rock drops
in & scoops a hole charming as the shape of a mouth singing the national anthem.
The Second Descent
The ground will thaw & freeze & the snow
on top of the mountain will become a heel
stomping the beer can house
at the bottom of the mountain. Five cent refund.
So shall I be disfigured.
Light will nibble at the surface of the winter
‘s river then slow under cloud cover, giving up,
then petrify from silver into shadow
then blinding then blind.
Dramatic slow-mo shot with lens cap on.
They’re killing Barnum & Bailey, the last man
on the moon. A man with a prop Bible
approaches the corpses.
There is no dramatic breeze left
for your elephant graveyard.
We’re so bored that we’re overshot
back to sober. This voice is always stuck
in my monologue like the Gideon’s Bible
in the bedside drawer of some hotel room
we only rented for the sex. I believe.
I believe the infirm
will not dance again, though we’ll dress them
in their best at the end. To make this all
a tent revival—a re-pastoral—you’ll paint
the bloated corpses as models of sleep.
I’ll sell the catastrophic horizon as sunset.
BJ Soloy is the author of Birth Center in Corporate Woods (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press), Our Pornography & other disaster songs (2019, Slope Editions), and the chapbook Selected Letters(New Michigan Press). His favorite song is Lou screaming "Tomato!" while hamfisting a piano. With Julie Rouse and the Tomato Kid, he lives in Des Moines, home of the Whatever.
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