POEM

I cannot know you tongue unfairly.

A lot, the puppet breezes in your eyes

I understand, because I’ve met you

only two or the three times alone

under the paper of sound and the meeting

and stars, which will never be quieter corn

POEM

I guess I did it right, my being here

the lawn was drawn by ham and pencil

and I got away with it, the charcoal pond

is penny gross but still has living

children in it, they touch their brains

and walk away with runburnt hands

because they know me here, my longer city

where the water and my organs are one &.

POEM

I wonder how you’ll leaf with me.

In the bars and the cigarette rounders.

The porcupines of soul worship

and the heavy ladles of the wish.

Every politeness grows its dairy

laid arithmetic - you know this -

and so I tell you to your face

that I stink God when I stink

underwater. Where the days

skim by like stranger fish.

POEM

Perhaps God will bless me with a Switzerland

of “bat tinnitus” - Perhaps you will

grow toward me like age

confined by the decorative miles

the one kilometer of sand

which is your body as I need to it

with wine staining the ongoing

construction project named Sunday

LLOYD WALLACE lives in Pittsburgh, where he runs Poetry Nightly. His first book, Mammal Pit, won the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize from the University of Chicago Press and will be released as part of their Phoenix Poets Series in March of 2027.