take the days & their scrambled
nights the shut valves of judges
& their unanchored mouths
a dance of inverted teeth & fish
hooks / our walls punctured &
cracking your mouth punctured &
cracking / here, take this: everything
& deicide: supersolid backdrop /
deciduous drip of death & dice what else
that & this endless dredging,
parse the gathering
miasma & tell me whether the orthography
will hold / all i am is
sound & sorry i thought that was enough
& in the dank quiet a music
echolulled into this unrun
republic
nothing but
restaurant & riot
murmur & murder &
further than before this is a
future / sutured daylight
a graft of daylight
for this here
counterparatactic insurgency this bellow & bluff
& i’m not talking
about nothing no
i’m talking about it all & then some & then the sun & then some
the grass
& the collective redistribution of rain & that’s
the difference between success &
an elevator between a felled tree & its deathcrash between
a graveyard & a forest
Mathilda Cullen
Mathilda Cullen is a poet and translator. Her books include "Trace Happenings" and the forthcoming Collected Poems of Ernst Toller. She runs marlskarx, an anti-press dedicated to publishing queer poets of the left, and Prolesound, a podcast and archive of contemporary leftist poetry and poetics.