Michael Borth


The Night Lot

Humiliation is a common shelf product
like baking soda and a hail of rice.
Placed in every forgotten garden, dry 
and calculated to a dust hold, creeping
a way to the street where the man feeds
the young horse a pear, when you cannot
identify what worries the sidewalk. Antenna
thrown against the rusted wall of the container.
Nothing to tell her. An exact journal of nowhere.
A receipt with only the prices. The feather
is the evolved bone and the woman marches
on heels to the coast of the avenue, the car explains
a future collapse of tyrannized constituent. 
The season of malefactor and dead friend. 
Not for me but for him, the world becoming
more cream cheese in more sushi. There is a raising
of the hands in the night lot of burning moth. 
Side step whatever that was there, whatever 
that could be, when there is no one to save
there is nothing to do, she eats her lunch 
amid the closed circuit tv and thread. Her children
annoy everyone, with the sound of, closing doors. 
 


The Godman

Bread thrown on the street and the doves
make a light organ of the decision. We will
never remain eyed like this, corrupted by the riches
we dedicated to ourselves in foreign car, in chaotic bar
imago degeneration fostered by simple arithmetic
and a misplace of tactic, of saturated word, of heavy pattern
spun over the city of minor character, quietly tattered
through reverb and advertisement and watching tango
as you arrived, awaiting a ring of sufficiency and maybe
a neon finger pointing at you, the liquid can be shaped
as the exploded book from the godman turns with those 
earlier doves to make one flock, one brief and total event. 
 


Lightgated

View hated
Incorruptible achievement
splayed in billboard light
yet crossed in shadow line
to a gross of hickory and oak
the elm unfocused in the rays
Still a wide turning, the caravan
fastforward’d to eighteen wheels
and the orange air of california
So the ocean can become a blue cream
a dairy of immaculate conception
A lightgated ion channel, or a lion
of instinctual grass bending, a torture
of all the places you will never go
go circle a floor and wonder why
anyone would choose to arrive
 


The Wind Suture

Cold effigy a wind suture
in the penultimate embrace.
Caressed, nonchalant, a canal
of horded bone, a chance to make
what is lost appear again, rubbing
each and every lamp, at the museum 
of sacred tone, you amass a huge hurricane
of apportioned control, fiberglass skeleton
is not a parallel of the papertissue ego 
in the crafted box I would give her, maybe
somewhere hot like miami, or havana
but there would have to be at least one dog
on one roof, against fading letters of acrylic
or the curving emblem of narcoticos anonimos. 
 


I Am The Opposite Of Your Friend

I am the opposite of your friend
And the opposite of your enemy
Held in ritualistic absolution
where Idiocy is completely natural.
Cielo and Naranja are The Only Words
you Need to know. He did drive
across the united states in The Car
his daughter required. He did not
Sleep. He was kept awake by The Ghost
of his Dead Brother. They, say A Man,
are hammering concrete apart
in the rubble of the prior Schoolbuilding.
There is a New Moon in Aries
though The Moon cannot be seen.
To be New is to be Invisible to The Eye.

Michael Borth is a writer from The Hudson Valley. His work has appeared in New World Writing, DFL Lit, SELFFUCK, Forever Magazine, Trampoline, Fence, and elsewhere. His novel, The Health Department, can be read here: thecoastlands.net/work.

 
 

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