#cal bedient

[coffinmouth]

I look into the rain barrel

of grief

and see that it is raining.

—Cal Bedient, When The Gods Put on Meter

[clmporg]

"I have never been so happy to meet anyone as I am to meet you in this dainty house by the bully sea." --Cal Bedient in the newest issue of Hunger Mountain

[omnidawn]

If anything suffices in or near the Piccinnini ex-world, suffice it to say that each of his poems is something to marvel at. He has arrived complete, 'already late, dismembering.'

Cal Bedient, at Lit Hub’s Best Poetry Collections of 2015

[omegatheunknown]

YOU SMELL OF DIVES WHERE A PRICK LIKE YOU IS HATED

Once I peeked through your mail slot and caught a glimpse of your quiet individual self-formed taste, the thousand pegs and pins. I must have wanted you dead to see you like that. You should always speak the little fires are in you. I am not diseased with the remark. Love cares to see the blackened tongues. You twitch with a gathering head stir. Yes, free the little speeds are in you. You're a real person when you go crazy like that. Their felt legs rolled up for carrying, your people stare from your pockets. Stump round and round the world with them, they are your darlings. they are not sparrows, they are not sparrows running like rats on the      cloud sleeves. Open your works-in-progress to them: let them choose their mausoleum. The horses I could eat, if I still hungered for you. Backcountry beauties farting lush grass.

-- Cal Bedient

[saravz]

Yes, look surprised, do, it suits you.

From "The Dead Put Up a Bad Fight" by Cal Bedient

[saravz]

I walk in the forest of my great mother’s hair as if it were my life. You mistake my night shrieks for her animal history of injuries. They’re the terror I feel when I wake with black petals stuffed in my lungs like motherless air. Yes, worry when you see me lying like a bird on its side, jingle my car keys when I go dead, continue to water my wine. Sometimes it helps. Love me enough to think of killing me. Then hold me, my little hairpin.

From "Muse of the Tender Night" by Cal Bedient

[saravz]

The water too mother-blank to be blank

From “The Ache of Not Yet Being" by Cal Bedient

[bibliomancyoracle]

Look, an old box in the basement full of application forms

*

from "FLOATING ANT" by Cal Bedient