LEWIS LaCOOK edits the online poetry magazine Idiolect. THE SIDEWALK FOR NO REASON The arid grasp of trees Can walk through headlights, Through slats in the sky. Beneath us, every yawn we kept To ourselves opens on a creek, What telephones use to touch. It's even darker now that Reeling as a verb has dried up, And none of the houses Can start their cars. Seems almost natural to Want things, even here, A van Making love without war into Rust. On my way in I Set the dogs off, so something Cooler creeps along where they Dug new seeds to plant houses, Up. Up at the sky the cars have Vapored. Smearing my wait. from NINE POPPIES Happy as shattered glass, seen in circles crossing Against herself, smooth and patient as time's emptying Motion, the fragment of moon caught in the gas of Her hair has stolen heads and jets, a wash that Deflates belladonna, caustic as the scorch of her Passing. You scrawl gurgles of world into the open Jar, Mindful of the birds, their solemn cries and Lethal lunges. Here there is no history. When Flame bends, again, to snuff head out, again; light's broken. THE FURORS OF ROOKS Then this design circumnavigates that pendulous maw, Making the limpid bunion's faith jangle. Greased paranoia educated the walls; A gyroscope on a strap reinforced her pinafore, Where a quadrillion moccasins stabilized broccoli That crimped at the furor's rundles, yon pipette Or an orris dirge of rooks in confluence With a magenta fire doll who demonstrates That her fir flesh, expatriated, Can yet enunciate dedications to an occident meretricious. Junior finally hollowed out his irking impoverishment. A hole in the fern drawled, "Jam and Geography's fringes where kids drown for the grail." The mobile pope, yes, in his holiday parka. INSTINCT Carried home your vase with teeth, deflowered by clouds and sobbing at the skin with sweat. What sweeter than these unities, seemingly fabricated, leaving the cathedrals untied and spilling out to the air? Now it sits; it vibrates like a perverted thing. By sips of instinct I navigate the penumbra that's when the phone's going to ring. By 1:30 in the morning Time's not as glued as it once was, seeking pilgrimage in soft lamp magic and the pins of magnetism gaping. One pint tequila, one's nibbling. Watch how the room wraps around the bottle. Horns or north, vox interior, a crust.