Weekly Poem: From ‘Severance Songs’

By Joshua Corey

This poem is the war on a very plain level.
Look at it cherishing you. Look how trustingly it sits
in the wrinkled palms of the wise men.

Now they shake its can full of tax dollars
and train exploding food on the countryside.

We recognize the sand, you and I, we deplore the poem
and its rage that is not bravery or counter-
intelligence. Suffering is reasonable as love
but this poem can’t barber its own hook clean.

It twists in the shrapnel breeze of my credibility.

It is made above all of words disarranged
to resemble an obvious truth.

                                                      This poem catches your hands
and releases them. It has no reflecting surfaces.

This poem does not spill a drop of the fluids that are yours.

Joshua Corey is the author of “Severance Songs” (Tupelo Press, 2011), “Fourier Series” (Spineless Books, 2005) “Selah” (Barrow Street, 2003) and two chapbooks. He teaches at Lake Forest College in Illinois.