Burn 1
Flap me a carpet at the carport like a good
Dadaist as he bicycles out of Berne.
I’ll be drinking grappa and sniffing verbena;
It’ll be obscene, and the obscenity will turn into phlox.
Like putting a wheel on a wall, the bed of
Phlox will practice abstinence.
The bees will go to the bank and get tanked
On absinth all wormed with the best wood.
We will meet apart, with just the killed trees ajar;
And cobbles; and wobbles; and blight as it scours air.
Burn 2
I baulked through the alley, the one like a hidden valley.
I bought cherries in Berne while rainforests burned.
Butterflies like switchblades cut circumference till it bled.
So stand on your head and talk with his heels.
Get wasted on creels; eat charcoal-grilled eels.
I did and I died but I am not dead.
A cat shed on the alley.
Milk turned but it did not turn into junket; and gems turned
Their facets to the titanium, the torques
Projected Summer’s Night Dream on his sternum.
Children in the long ago razed convent picked up their forks,
Pitched peas into appeasements for hell: its breezes the best falernum.
The two constituent parts of this couplet, like many poems of mine, are generated by foregrounding rhyme and word-play. To a significant degree, content occurs incidentally: I definitely wasn’t thinking about Berne even a split-second before writing the first word of either of these Burns.
Adam Strauss lives in San Diego, CA. He has one full-length collection out—For Days (BlazeVox, 2012)—as well as several chapbooks, the most recent one titled Postcard of/Itself out with Tilted House. Individual poems have appeared in Apartment, Atmospheric Quarterly, Ballast, the Brooklyn Rail, New American Writing, Prelude, Volt, and Word For/Word. Shifting planes, he is forever in love with Marc Chagall’s “I and the Village.”