Poems by C. Brannon Watts

BETTER AS A DUET

I left her there, the side of a road covered in neon spill
bare shoulders covered in oily shards of glass. a littered
homunculi, her cellophane impossible to parse. cacti split
by the passage of semis into blue arrows, the green leather
of their bodies another tale upon the road’s braille. arms
heavy with the overnight rain, the hills I rose against:
into the arid lance of air, into the sun’s hangover spill.
a hue like song rang within the scarred heap, rock and
ruin, some hidden species’ fumble with time, metered.

I left her there, adrift in tuneless chaos – the soft filigree
of her fingers like smoke or heat oscillation, the caress
of a thing unseen. the carcass of moment, hollowed and
hanging above the abandoned motel, home now to all
but the living. a lone shadow slid ‘cross the sand, time
stalling, animal time. lizards and beetles cannot look up.
a susurrant shiver in the ground as the riverbed fills, the
sudden cold splitting geodes, washing away what gold.

I left her, her sides heavy in the deep, deep dark. shared
space tumescent as if a storm were raging just beyond,
all colors draped across the lanes and valleys in a spend-
thrift hand. the doomed sands hissed in the scent of the
storm’s burgeoning, the storm that was not and without.
at night then and especially just before light emergent, a
call went out. echoing around the knees of the sleeping
ladies, whose heads held the scatter of careening stars,
shattered like wolves, composed.

I left, the barren landscape carved into a blind-baked
mockery by my speed, the cloche of an exhaust about
my ears. a moment when I saw the mount’s knees open
ahead of me and felt it as memory, the thin line of the
dark oasis I knew was real.


GOING TO JUMP AHEAD

There was an entry/exit point into the country that spun
slowly above their heads as they gathered at the fences.
it was made of an iridescent material, a metal, a shell,
indiscernible from their heads five feet above a clinging
cloud of dirt and particulate sadness, their eyes occluded
to all but the shine of the sign they could not read, the
glare of the trashed and spitting neon, the hollow thumps
of the laundry walls outside which the ladies of the town
gathered for a quick lick at the salt block. these last figures
should have been tragic in their servitude, the hard blocks
of shadow in the sere white sun, the washed out grays of
wood planking. they stood like black cylinders upon an
erratic chessboard, their pale hands drawing tracery. from
outside, the rasping of tongues against the salt was a wall
of sound they could not escape, pulling at them like a cat’s
claws, the burring static an electric blue sound.

When the bells rang, the comedy was revealed. the ladies
did not move, entranced by the giant coruscant blocks in an
animal urge toward completion. but the bell introduced new
figures into the scene, these shorter and burning brightly at
the feet in puddling flames of green and yellow, their heads
at the height of the ladies’ elbows, whose attentions had
achieved an orgasmic frenzy at the salt, which was now
stinging a jagged contralto at the pitch of their linguistics.
the shorter figures, male beyond visible doubt, circled in
tighter and tighter arcs in counterpoint to the burring. sparks
flew.

The fences dropped, the pressing masses freed at last to the
airs of the town, but none moved. they stood between paired
oscillations: the sound of salt and the dirt that swallowed them,
and stared.