BURNING HOUSE PRESS

I’ve been circling lakeside for years

    cypress knees are fine    fine        thought 

    they were a breathing mechanism, but recently 

    researched into support        marginal buttress

    more waist-high concealment 

Every loop a filmed apocalypse held

the length of a lizard’s tail

easy to detach

I’m     sprung aloof 

By the end, memory is        abandoned 

                    & I’m still speechless

        swaddled in a thicker gunk called glow

        say gray diligence 

                                    Nothing emerges

                                    from perfect repetition    the loop

                                    devours all possibility, gurgling 

                                    warm at the center    everyone still

                                    blank where I left them 

Here I am, laying out the longest 

waiting room – red carpet gone to sun-bleach

I watch the lake for displacement, 

though I’m not sure anything can live 

in a constructed hollow;

fishers line the sides, though I’ve never seen them move            a landscape 

                                            I can’t totally trust 

    because I keep coming back 

Recently, objects have been vanishing, or simply 

giving up the ruse

cattails reared in absence

nimble false bearings 

There’s a stranger yet to arrive – summoned back         to me;

We’ll shake hands, I’ll ask where they’ve been, though I know the answer  

I’ve only ever emulated the business of obfuscation 

What is the opposite of water displacement? When a thing erupts from deep volume? 

The belief is there, but in practice I’m another statue     sweat

fastening fissures 

Nobody has fallen from the sky in years

Phil Spotswood is a poet from Alabama, and a PhD Creative Writing student at Illinois State University. His most recent work can be found in baest, The Wanderer, and Tagvverk. He is the recipient of the 2018 Robert Penn Warren MFA Poetry Thesis Award judged by Tonya Foster, and the 2017 William Jay Smith MFA Poetry Award judged by Daniel Borzutzky. He tweets @biometrash.