Francis Raven

Salvaging Shards: A Sonnet

These bizarre creatures be saved
By low-probability events kicked in this depressed mill’s gutters:
An academic conference saves your ass every time.

What I swear you will swear:
These objects lead to other tails, tugged.
Small umbrellas cover heads up your rain.

Look strange and broke, smashed. This sea-glass,
How come I have never heard of sea-plastic?
What is the remainder of art in my life as a movie?

Fall is the only season when I don’t vomit over the quaint.
The apple cider is nice, and the leaves, they touch me before they rot,
But I need the NY Times on Sunday. My culture is above another’s head.

These shards intersect at the movie theater,
Unpopped kernels in the lower left hand corner of modern art.

                                              Saturday, October 08, 2005


Faucets Pause Beneath The Value Of A Rain-Jacket

What about the width of senses:
napkins
            kept waiting
                        with the wind
pungent
                        flies baiting careers behind?

glare
somehow
always
wins

The scaffolding bent within us
has never been more ready for a skyscraper,
but behemoths are so out of fashion these days.
The new urbanism speaks variously about integrated potentialities,
stores over apartments, parks in the middle, walking your dog through the bank.
That’s what I’m trying to learn in therapy.


But If You Tape a Sample of Hair to the Window…

However sloping
stroke
elbow anchor
dip caress

And now I mean
the bent metallic hours
transformed
into public houses

These sour dividers
kindly
spritzed for all night hair
might as well be all I wear


Shoving a New Book Off the Brain

Pushing off the lifting
Space is just an outward gulp
Some conceptual clamor

Air: Book Structure:
     (1) Breathing (pollution, lungs, clean air, public goods)
     (2) Birds and flight
     (3) Possibly space

Words it might lift
Announcement makes a dress below the force



Francis Raven is a graduate student in philosophy at Temple University. His first book of poems, Taste: Gastronomic Poems (Blazevox, 2005), and novel Inverted Curvatures (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005), were recently published. Poems have been published in Mudlark, Conundrum, Chain, Big Bridge, Bird Dog,Caffeine Destiny, and Can We Have Our Ball Back? among others. His critical work can be found in Jacket, Clamor, The Electronic Book Review, The Emergency Almanac, The Morning News, The Brooklyn Rail, Media and Culture, In These Times, The Fulcrum Annual, Rain Taxi, and Pavement Saw.
 
 
 
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