Albert Flynn DeSilver

Albert Flynn DeSilver runs The Owl Press (www.theowlpress.com), sending along some recent prose poems from the published "TOOTH & CLOUD". with recent work Exquisite Corpse, Web del Sol, New American Writing, ZYZZYVA, Hanging Loose, and many others. He can be reached at asisowl@mindspring.com.

AMERICAN BAGGIE

A plastic grocery bag does an elegant dance against a brick wall back

drop. A teenage boy gazes into its movements mesmerized by the crinkled

pirouettes, its undulating sweeps, its flesh-like painterly tremblings.

Up it swirls into a cadence of stars only to fall abruptly through

absent breath around the boy’s head. The wind cinches the bag’s handles

in a knot around his neck. The boy’s head bloats and turns dark purple

behind the ragged visage of the bag. The boy is now floating up against

a brick wall backdrop in an elegant dance, in crinkled pirouettes, in

undulating sweeps of flesh-like painterly tremblings.

THE FOGGY SCALP

Out to sea this evening I watch the horizon line buckle and snap under

the weight of the setting sun. Two distinct green sticks collapse

inward towards each other pulling in the drowning sea. Only to be

replaced by a single sky made of matted hair and skin cells in octagonal

patches. This sure baffles the captain and his deck hands who have run

aground in the great scalp with the wrong tool for the job. Now during

those long crossings they just sit around scratching themselves, staring

into the foggy scalp

ONE THUMB BOOK

I am building a little book for my thumb, where I will shovel lint from

the street’s navel and juice lullabies from the treetops. It is a book

of elastic steel married to song. An opposable piano picked up in

Mozambique. Each page a print, a maze of jagged feet clamoring up the

stairwell of your spine. This a gnarled tornado as opposed to a combed

one. This a hairy coin of sorts, the flipping of which is the fondling

of crude feathers, where we memorialize the world record holder in the

pole vault.

WALKING THE DOG

I’m off to walk the dog this morning, when I notice my hat’s on fire. I

run upwards trying to flag down a saturated cloud. No luck, the fire

spreads into my scalp and head starting a smoldering root fire in my

cranium. I think, "wow, like, accelerated honey shed from the core of

the sun". No matter, the dog must be walked. "No fire as mad as the

unwalked dog" I yap into the flames, flesh bubbling up popping off

bone. Soon enough I am walking an ashen self on an ashen leash, the

neighbors asking ashen questions, the dog barking forth some ashen

answers.

HEAVEN HAS LAYERS

Some mysterious surgeons with silent hands showed up at the factory one

day. I blacked out with fear being held in some chasm of water turned

to fire. There were murmurings of invisible animals I questioned, and

then laughter rang out from the lava swamp. What can I say of the

factory basement, the less-than-beautiful sight of me coming to, in

flames. Rising up through the office, past shipping & handling, the

public area, reception, all less pretty than the previous layers. I

rise, the surgeons follow, chasing me with clacking scalpels and hoods

of dark gauze— through all the layers I hated to work. And so I had

stolen an umbrella, to catch a warm updraft, rising toward the ceiling

like an unpeeled scar, into the umbrella shaped skylight, and out of the

grasp of the crimson surgeon’s hands.

Albert Flynn DeSilver