#brian barker

[othellho]

Brian Barker, “A Story of Teeth”

[othellho]

Brian Barker, “Moths”

[largethingslargerthings]

Meditative Week of Poetry: Brian Barker

The fish thief was just a harmless orphan, we realized too late, after the mob had harpooned him through the back. For nights after, he wandered the foggy streets of our seaside town, crying, until Madame X lured him in through the side door of the brothel. “There, there,” she whispered, guiding him to the table, to a plate of madeleines, a glass of milk. Her rat terrier circled, whimpering, then plopped down to chew the frayed end of the long rope the dead boy dragged behind him. All night he sat there, and all night from the parlor, we took turns standing on a chair to spy on him through the transom. Occasionally he tilted his head, deciphering the sea’s susurrations that lapped the kitchen curtains. We hoped by dawn he’d be gone. We could see the barbed blade that exited where his heart had been. It jutted before him into the candlelight, cold and gleaming, pointing the way from here to there.

[litmaglunch]

Beet and Chicken Salad and 32 Poems Fall/Winter 2014 People, I love beets. They are tasty and delicious. I know they are one of those flavors not everyone enjoys. Oh well more for me. Here I have some grapefruit and romaine as well. I got this recipe out of a salad cookbook. 

I love 32 Poems. It’s one of those magazines I’m always trying to place work in but I have had no such luck so far. I keep reading since I’m such a fan. Here I especially love “Night Thoughts” by A.E. Stallings and “Moths” by Brian Barker.

[writingaroundthesun]

MOTHS

Their faces, even without mouths, will be serious. Their heads will be burnt matches. Their wings will be scraps of paper dusted with ash, bearing the last scribbled reports of complete annihilation. The lights will flicker off in the houses. The smoke will choke back the moon. And yet, they will witness nothing, a flock of white noise in the weeds. Death will wait quietly inside the cylinder of their bodies like a puddle of black rain in the hull of a rotting canoe. Meanwhile, they will rise in darkness above ruined estuaries: ghosts of oysters rowing to the opposite shore.

-by Brian Barker

[literarymiscellany]

For though I'm small, I know many things, and my body is an endless eye through which, unfortunately, I see everything.

Gloria Fuertes, "Now," translated from the Spanish by Brian Barker. 

[fluttering-slips]

Love Poem for the Last Night on Earth  

When they ask me to account for my time on earth, I will confess: I loved tomato pie

& too much beer, waking up in the blue beam of the television, my head in your lap, how I could hear the last birds gathering beneath your skin. You smelled like mint

& the cold blade of the kitchen knife, & our laughter left teethmarks those long July days, as the dark beyond our door culled its armies,

a combustion of insects & heat hitching our house to the blind grasses, the pasture sliding away like a calm sea.

Love, what leaned in & drank from the eyes of the horses as their silhouettes passed like slow ships? What folded its thin wings & sank into our hearts?

  Brian Barker