2 Poems

By Nicholas Rombes

I Really Understand the Green

I really understand the green
river for the first time, the buried un-pieced
bodies the serial killer graved, so carefully.
The leaky Tecumseh water tower drips gold
rust like some ancient Nile time machine.

I’m in the abstract Michigan fields now, fucker, mid-winter,
disguised by snow. Night. The black barns keening.
My boot prints trace
a literal criminal record that an everlasting God
will melt away come spring.

The weird untraceable sinking of human thought
in Williams Hall, Bowling Green.
It takes infrared detective beams
to discover secret moments, Emily,
of the fat barred owl, the overwatcher, in the crooked
lonely meadow tree.

Good Goddess help me
now, these fucking campus dreams these
fortune-telling
Bowling Greens these unrelenting
burning green river purple fetus unborn greenish killer.

These absurd and shaky rhyme schemes I need to keep
myself away from myself and the green green that makes
itself a part of self and, thus, green invisible self, a kind
of abstract reckoning of the green Ohio meadows spilled out

from your perfect

open

mouth

When the Saturn Rings

The dog walkers, the cat lovers, the fuckers.
The simple-minded baristas and the silent
treatment from mothers.
The sick, sad Saturn stages of mourning: good
riddance to the dearly departed buried
deep in Bowling Green clay
fields. Okay. So. Your Sofia Coppola stage your
Lars von Trier stage, I loved them both. And yet
it’s your cold left foot, stricken by MS, that I rub beneath
our 356 Hilldale sheets. The familiar façade: we
are so happy. Come join us
until the reedy ends of deep sleep in that crazy room
at the MGM in Detroit. Fuck
the Lions, of course. It’s the hard edges, right, Lisa
that you want to avoid? I can help you erase
yourself. I get it, this desire to disappear once
and for all and, God, I love your Old Testament
violence please, please, help me help me to make
it all, all the shit-ridiculous of human thought
to just go, forever, away.

Nicholas Rombes is author of the novels The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (Two Dollar Radio) and The Rachel Condition (CLASH Books), as well as Ramones from Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series.