Jared Stanley
How to establish secrecy
I want what you want: for our secret enthusiasm to stay secret
both here and not here. You like to hover because
feeling the earth means getting covered in shit-water
—what has everyone been eating? I like to hover too,
but half my wing is a blister, has impetigo or a hole in it, so
I just dangle. That’s how I know I’m still alive.
How did you pull that other person’s face off
and put it over your own? I like your mask, but it scares me.
Fits too well. Your nose looks very smooth but your forehead blurs.
The face was mine — I keep away from mirrors, touch my cheek
and wince, keep quiet: it hurts too much to form a question.
Another green hell
The neighbors complain of too much blurring in the windows, normal green, sickening blue. They can’t see us inside us, three X-rays of an iris held up to the sun, see-through air where people in a family should be, green holes whistling dust through the fucked-up face of an empty house. A faint tick, and I wipe the blood off, climb the altar stair, pry the surface open with a blade. The mud is like science on the shoe, a dried scrap of marrow disinfects it. Inside my eyelid another smooth-faced fascist grins half a melted disc of grease for a tooth, licks it with his solidity. “I want to make you safe” he says, “you deserve it.” Is that how it looks from that side of a wall? Out of the glittering klieg of an eye hole come these instructions, printed on a dirty receipt: “When the moment comes, insert your whole face into the green hell/blue hell at the center of my defenses, this ring of motion sensors, world I call it. I know your mind is composed of fluid. Let it drip on the concrete over there. Can you feel the clean dream tickle its way up your thorax? You can, right? Now you know what to do.” He spits from his eye: a curdled chunk drips on a dried thistle-stalk. It’s green in my skull. At least that’s what I told the neighbors.
When we saw the corpse flower
Scorpio eclipse so my mind’s running hot
orbiting a hidden pebble from the earth’s anus
to the soundless applause on Zoom
from the dried-up french fries touching a cock ring in the cheatgrass
to my couch reclining in the middle of nowhere
I count how many bullets are a united state
and place a red word upon the green
thinking just behave yourself
adjust thine back to the wheel
no wonder
the kid thinks everything is poison
old people love selling images of Basquiat
me, I make a waste connection:
a fine dust adds value to the notebook
Jared Stanley’s fourth collection of poetry, So Tough, is forthcoming from Saturnalia in 2024. He is also the author, most recently, of The Blurry Hole and Other Stories, a pamphlet of images and little prose fictions (in collaboration with Sameer Farooq). Born in Arizona, Jared grew up in Northern California and lives in Reno, Nevada, where he teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno.