Robert Beveridge


PEDAL FLY

mythos winks in crowded liquid,
beckons with a crooked bowel,
an alcopop, the incunabula of St.
Virgil the Bucolic. apply chalk
to the head of the pool cue, crack
a joke about Hansen’s Disease,
pick up the phone and get to work
on that movie about haunted hair
that’s been stuck in your head
for years. The kids’ll go mad for it.



MESSIAH

cast off
the light
changed itself
into a razor



IN MOST LANGUAGES, BLADE IS DECLINED AS A FEMININE

The mouth is where most of the fine
work is done, the slice of silence
the interrupts the laughter, the piece
of roast beef wedged under the gum,
the voice that never sounds the same
in your head as it does to other people.
We measure consciousness in fleas,
in the space between each hair
on a lion’s back. The work is smooth,
almost smooth enough to believe in, yet
still there are those jerks, those fits,
that leave you to wonder whether it is,
indeed, all just a film, whether we need
to find a way to flip the script before we
reach the inevitable bloodbath in the fifth act.




Robert Beveridge makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in New American Legends, Toho Journal, and Chiron Review, among others.
 
 
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