William Repass

DE STIJL

October,
we stop

a while
outside

a shop.
In ranks

behind bars:
wooden legs

prop chairs for sale,
shedding photographs

of leaves. Exposing,
like branches,

force + direction:

information
in formation
in formations.

How many years
until march turns over?

 

DIATOMACEOUS EARTH

                     benevolent spies                                                           disks
          shadow their own steps &                                                    & storage
                    root down, upending                                              of food-pyramids 
                                     petri dishes                                        quintessence 
                        chock full of -nessless                                  sublimated
                                     structures,  & in                            blinks, into the
                  counting-down the glassware                        between greedy
                            take great care to not let                    if justified, rising
                             slip a sphere of power to               & white soul appear as 
                         burst into chain-links of code        now images of the black
                                            decoded into countless putrescent little minds—

 

COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE

& just as lucre
rules it be
hooves us we 
let ourselves by
our skinned teeth 
be set to
spinning
for a thread
bare fee as if 
free
ly embroidered
into this whirling of
wool-wheels
needing needle
stick & stuck
in our own sweat
boxes fatiguing teeming still
sweeter with the
stench & stitch
of dreamt wed
lock greased
in animating
poverty’s mnemonics re
& rewritten into
skin’s skin cheaply
& cheaper
until such seams 

as begin seeming
lines dotted through this
our infinite debt
like ink wells with
out an inkling isn’t
a deed a mere
mirror soak
brush brush
stroke & key
bleed red read
er                re
member how a rose
still stuck is in it

 

COLA COMMERCIAL

citizens of the heart attack
work posthumously, held

accountable to a crack
in cocaine syntax: no revolución

but a revolver, slapstick, says
“bang” in blank parody of another

republic's bananapeel repealed pulse,
repeater: bank on bombshell-blonde bangs

cut straight across the warhead
of an émigré Vietnamese & me.

 

BINGE

I have Munched à l'Edvard a sac of chips and
polished off the total of Sappho's fragments.
Can't I taste the difference? It seems my gut can
glue them together,

into wholeness greater than wholeness: union!
melting-pot democracy belches, blood and
bile rising: I am a donut hole [  ]
softening slowly,

breaking into liquid, imprisoned in my
colon's own hinge. Rupture is certain, but it's
private, stuck. Screaming a [
                            ]

Originally from Los Alamos, New Mexico, William Repass lives and works as a film librarian in Pittsburgh. His writing has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Denver Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, Hobart, and elsewhere.
 
 
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