blackmail press 29
Scott Alexander Jones
New Zealand

In Your Enigma - Ilinca Höpfner
In Your Enigma - Ilinca Höpfner
index
Scott Alexander Jones is the author of a collection of poems: “One Day There Will Be Nothing to Show That We Were Ever Here” (Bedouin Books, 2009). He completed his MFA at The University of Montana and was Writer-in-Residence at The Montana Artists Refuge during October of 2009.

He is co-founder of Zero Ducats, a literary journal comprised entirely of stolen materials, and releases music under the moniker Surgery in the Attic.

He currently lives in Wellington, New Zealand.
from “elsewhere”



And if I am sleeping thru the lullabies of a summer

storm, you are screaming



an arsenal of auburn



cellos into hiding—



Your lipstick desperately flamingo.

Soundlessly agape as Civil War daguerreotypes.



We have arrived



at the scene of the film where the first bullets hail down—

All sound cuts out—



Your larynx



banished brailleward



by explosions in the sky.

Toward the more taciturn outskirts of:



anywhere but here—



The nowheres



we/ll no longer witness together—

Scouring burnt lexicons in search of the perfect word for:



murmurs of wind



caught in a vacant stairwell—






from “elsewhere”



There are words



like: heartwood, petrichor



for lumber resistant to decay—

For the fragrance of rainfall on dry earth—



Their patents pending



as medicine for hummingbirds

to resemble a pageantry of elaborately feathered insects



rather than spies



transmitting the twitches of fractured lips

to the flapper girls dancing



the Charleston



just outside the veiled electricity

of my peripheral vision.





from “elsewhere”



There isn/t a word for



the distant moan



of Bozeman locomotives—



Soft caterpillars of the vacant night—

And I refuse to evoke sousaphones trapped in Nerja Caverns—



The way my army of



mascara skeletons



will be more dead tomorrow than they are today—

How apoptosis



means: programmed cell death



means: the moment our eyes first adjust to florescence

something inside us



conspires against us.

Yet we don/t exactly wilt like lettuce left



outside summer mausoleums—





from “elsewhere”



Sprinklers have been planted between caskets we call

buried



so rapture, rush



hour traffic or massive plague

won/t prevent the daily watering of the dead—



Revived



courtesy of percolation

as interpreted by the cerebral cortex:



Still squinting on bended knee in the cannabis garden—



Or nakedly losing at poker in a Russian submarine—

Oceanward as the undertow



that took her away



& by her I mean, ultimately:

All freckled girls who one day won/t breathe



pollen nor premonitions



of midsummer rain

on freshly paved blacktop—






from “elsewhere”



Here, lawnmower blades latticework as DNA



rust dull in brushwood—



Crabgrass uproots one wayward gravestone three infants share

namelessly—



Lukewarmly



assuming room temperature

just shy of translating screams into speech—



Fruitless centenarians of this day in late July

equally unalive



as the Siamese twins



named: Aven & Trillion



we parted ways before making—

Who came gently in a dream where nobody chases you



darkward thru sewerways



& all your teeth remain intact—