BURNING HOUSE PRESS

Bristles from a Paintbrush, Like the Entrails from a Better Somewhere-else

by Jake Syersak

What heart beats its way from within

a heartless nation beats like a makeshift, mis-wired weedwhacker: a wrinkle: a pulsating vein at the edge

of God’s eye.

Here I sit, and here I daydream, not of kingdoms-to-come, but kingdom come


Inside every snail shell dwells a sleep I will envy

to the grave or deeper and darker into hell is where my mind is going today.

“They say Courbet could give in his nudes all the character of Paris,” wrote the painter Chaïm Soutine,

“I want to show all that is Paris in the carcass of an ox”


Unto themselves churn the thickets, unastonished by our dominion;

like a city laid waste, whereabouts to wereabouts; like the connect-the-dots of birdsong come dusk, a Febreze of unsoftening wildflowers,


or worms, occurring where the beating of hearts once were


How I have tried to untwist these thoughts from one another, only to find

the sharpness of an insecticide in the shape of I-

am-an-acquired-taste

traveling my throat like a tongue: like a knife: whose end is already a revolution whose end I cannot say

because I cannot say the end enough


Unfirmament me, senses.

On my way out the door, I strip some lavender into my fortune-fresh palm

and force these united states from my mind

Jake Syersak is the author of the poetry books Mantic Compost and Yield Architecture. He is also the translator of several works by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine and Tahar Ben Jelloun. His work has received grants from The National Endowment of the Arts and PEN/Heim. He currently lives in Olympia, WA.