« John Sweet » Buzz In the season of airplanes, in the age of blackened miracles, says Lift those heavy islands. Says Dream the wounds all healed. A simple enough gesture, but if the dogs are still hungry. If the lovers are found by a husband or a daughter. If, which means yes. Yes, which means now, here in this windowless room, on your knees, on my back, daylight through an open doorway like music. Like prayer. A gift that I give you freely. My love, which tastes like your sighs. Which feels like the heat between your legs. This moment never ending The Difference if her fingers are cut off one by one to the music of laughter if her laughter is a sound i would describe as god’s anger is a prayer i would hold in my broken teeth and when i get up to leave she pulls the sheet over her breasts and says don’t move says don’t breathe don’t spoil the moment and sometimes this is fine sometimes i can’t be too sure it is only a small ocean between us In This Field of Broken Glass Where the Horses Are Being Starved these houses in this white haze of september with their shadows spilling out towards the edge of town with their ghosts exiled to fields of ruin their windows broken their sounds the sounds of misplaced childhoods the boy left to die in the side yard the mother drowning the dreaming and all of us guilty you saw the bruises you heard the screams walked to the store while the factories burned and the river ran red with blood or you sat in the darkness behind the gas station with the smell of garbage pressed tight against every window and your mouth thick with the taste of someone else's wife you were the town and the town was fading i was my father without explanation his hands and his fear and his endless self-hatred his infinite self-pity and i argued politics with the deaf and i explained picasso to the blind and we ended up alone in windowless rooms we were sold as slaves or we bought the flesh of others called it love and the clocks ran backwards and i sat at my desk considering suicide i sat in my car with my eyes closed with the days growing shorter and all of these streets as empty and ugly as i remembered them and none of them going anywhere none of us loved nothing to do but turn away from ourselves and drive John Sweet, b. 1968, single father of 2. Overeducated, underpaid, a believer in writing as catharsis and in the ultimate futility of poetry, politics and religion. Recent collections include the chapbook FAMINE (www.leafpress.ca) and the full length HUMAN CATHEDRALS (www.ravennapress.com). He will gladly point the finger, but refuses to accept the blame.