Two Poems by Felipe Gaston Muñoz

The Drop Keels, Book One, IX

interred ~ Hannah Porter’s four,

Samuel Williston, four girls, none

past six, Lucretia’s firstborn, Mary

Newman, “low among

the silent” threescore -

lampen streak, no tavern that night,

she primed + lightning “the fire,”                               

Lavinia’s streak across cloud such dark,

whatever flame sent her abroad, vastly,

but brought stiff planks rekindled,

Squire’s proceeds, ruined, things

public, still doused them ~ revived,

not him ~ even for such fevers as

struck the pious that season, for

that elected dawn flutters the

cardinal over her narrower wood,

Martha Ann Graves, read that still

in Sabbath School Visiter by an eye

so hummingbird ~ one foot bare

in cardinal blooms, how we tread

sometimes soles naked up to

Mount Norwotock’s trillium,

white estuaries that bright

her ankle complimented +

Abiah rooted this day our earth,

what remnants of nightgown, we

cottoned flesh-borne, the root of our

senses, scored thinner heavenwards,

abided no thunder-flood, skied up

East, moth speaker, who were you

that moon in bedclothes, and at dawn

slept under heathers? forget your

herbarium and come with, whatever

transgress we made to wildflower

roams, there a kiss to light, crescent

at dusk ~ relieves all ~

+ kenned + espied

+communicant

The Incidentals, Book One, Fragment

‍at the curb, just as the light changed to green,

did he see that the neutron might rend

something of all magnitude and of all limit,

magnitudes made impecunious shards of us,

and meaning wasn’t even yet in question, but

he sustained himself in those years from two

suitcases, always at the ready, for some other

institute – back then Planck barred corpuscles

from reversing time, no winged dragon back

into a worm, the mechanical world an impasse to

thermodynamic direction – “no, no, he’s rescinded

most of the Tractatus, didn’t you hear? -- bungled

in what rumor rag? - really, there’s no picture

language -- only what? - only what” – and she

dallied; the zinc-sulfide varnish in the orchard,

O Marie, you inflamed Pierre’s hand in that

fluorescent minute and all night abated, some

night afterward Otto touched actinium, didn’t

you emit the alpha particle again? hydro-

cephalic, the Vienna of her lusts, our damned

Wasserkompf, the Jugendstil secrétaire trumeau

gawked under some voltage spout’s glimmer,

how gaudy of a decadent sun to light the way,

Edison, Brünn, 1911, reportage, lit up Fröhliche

Apokalypse into an era! ‍

Felipe Gaston Muñoz would like to note further orthographic eccentricities on this website: “er” for “or” in the age of good old E.D. Originally from Arizona, he spends his time freaking out over idiosyncratic typography and impossibly arcane, 16th century punctuation. He is currently working on two long poems, The Drop Keels and The Incidentals. One of his poems is forthcoming in Barrow Street Journal. Lastly, he apologizes to any of our Massachusetts readers for the orthographically obsolete “Norwotock” for modern-day “Norwottuck.”