Carla Harryman


Get over it

Shepard across the river
A bat-like ghoul
Squire something years later
You never met
The shareholders
Holdout on the acreage
Until, there
Is a fence
Get over it
Get on over
Then squat in your body
Form within form
A peasant pose
Conceals the look you gave no one
It wasn’t there
Wasn’t you
Got to eat, don’t
Morsel the gravey, shove it
In who-knew’s gap
In Empire, just after anonymous
Was ousted for a hunch
Now her body is a shrub






How I Knows You

What’s genre?  You ask
Who needs to know? I knows
you. The verb
in my hand got 
your number.  22 is part
of it. The rest is for know-how
three letters and a number
pressed between the word
alibi—
Tightfisted to the grave
genre isn’t worth the code it’s written for
Protest the expanded fields if you like
That’s why you’re asking, 
right ?

About now our laptop has a meltdown
Some masterpiece gave it a pain

It couldn’t hold back the
terms and co-motions
You know about what happens when
they sweat just one tear
so anyone can get this is
serious—
That verb—expletives can be verbs
right? —
buttons up in official gab
whispers to my digits
The breeze of its breath
makes them all thumbs 
for an embarrassed minute.  In the meantime
Alibi arrives with dinner jackets
that don’t fit





Judgment Daze

Your thinking is too abstract
For my taste
Your music is too rough
To my ear
Your heartache
Is over the top
Your taste would be better
If worse
Your potshot hit the mark
Your bad
Is still bad, a few days out
A cluster
Of candy wrappers stuck in a pothole
Issue
A cute reminder to avoid wading
In the road
As your eyesight is not the same
As your stray attention

What appears rough on the road
Conceals something smooth and dangerous
Evil as an abbreviation
In a legal document





That’s


That barricade

The black of the house

Was trees, an elbow 

Wasn’t it?

Let’s not be too reg’lar that’s why


Scratch my back

That’s why weren’t too

Worried weren’t too peopled up

Too suckered


Stoke fired out

I get calm after it

After the little known

Fact issues its dateline

Fabuloso plan


Farewell, my likeness

The rate doubles just after

The wager


Bestiary in giving lip once

Was an entire kingdom

In skeletal,  nevermind

Ratchet hunk flay flay who


Made sans consultation with the weave

It go total

Scheme

Minus net no inter

But interior


Caught out caught going to hang

Outside gated condo

A little daydream 

For the losers 

En train


Glory be agent’s visor

A screen gone

Damp and leggy and healthier than those

Gizzards


Lizards and police of  old tunes

A display of cant

But low and behold the whittle

Downsizes nerve

Those bastards of the 17 legal pill boxes 


Deserve it, if only it

Didn’t trickle down to you, me

The kid over there


Hefty hefty inside track

Ratchet was

Ratchet does 

The toolkit’s raked Fury

Furry song best boy stocked tether

See package, not re’glar

Humming but special iteration

Bird, that’s the line twisting

A line to follow and

Follow it! Birdeee

Otherwise a voice in your title might give you time


Who needs prison when you’ve got punishment with you

Along for any ride

Basking in last night’s bird-machine 

Glowing in lumens, earnings keeping up

With 


Spittoons of greasy mugs

They didn’t think about how long they’d be alive

That’s what the expert explained