Green Linden Press

Hilt                                                                                                                            —Patrick Milian

            Hunter’s Hill, Colorado

a two-headed coin
stuck slit-wise
in sumac bark
            Lady A to Lady B
                        Don’t be dull.
            Lady B to Lady A
                        As mouthy
                        as mythy.
            Ladies A & B
            grown into
            a tree grown
                        on up-swollen Hill
                        mown and unmown
                        beside a lead-green
                        public pool troubled
                        as minnow-thought
hammered into crack
pith unsplitting
steely semi-circle
            to me:
                        We think you see it
                        but you don’t
                        see it recede.
            teenager’s double-fate
                                    shock of sliver
                                    one-eyed each
they named the subdivision Hunter’s Hill
and grown into the Hill’s tallest young tree’s
meat-white slash:         double exposition
                                    seeing/saying un/home
            to teen-scatter
they say:          Wake up landshocked mandragon.
                        Wake up landcocked fuzzdragon.
            Hunter’s Hill
            lifts long like
            a hunted’s
            pelvic crest

            •

where the moon was so slow it’d shine backward
                        wet and yogurt-white
He was            not a Hunter and neither was he.
                        but in orange
and burning summer │ fire about horizon │ they unscattered
                        into each other
Given enough time there’s both a home and not.
                        but in winter
air bright off snow │ off rode-shiny street │ ice spread slush
                        spread wet
spread shine │ night spread miasma but punctured
                        by cherry-light
                                    boys will kiss │ will not penetrate
                                    will take turns going down after kissing
                        perpetrate a young
                        taste of taste
                                    the way a head lifts in time with a tremor
                                    of a gawked shoulder blade tap │ tap there
                        to the hilt
                        crest of pelvis
                                    who will take the spunk first and last
                                    nothing red yet between them
                        but gasp
                        and spunk
of flame to the tips of two cigarettes
                        eye │ eye
between the sumac limbs light is sliced and hazed
                        through fog thick
as limbs and colorless as a lifting or lowering
                        this bracelet
is made of fingernails so it’ll scratch your wrist
                        but I want
you to wear it as a charm against curfews
                        g’night │ g’night

            •

how the gasp is both in the bone and not
            What, like a four-on-the-floor
            fluted androgynous sweating
            while someone’s brother watches
            could suburbanize them
            anything but harmless?
What’s youth afraid
to lay eyes on,
<<first_name>> <<last_name>>?
            Where are your parents?
No glassy branch of lightning
is as hard as the plumb pool
it breaks up and up into.
            Where is your house?
                        seven is five and five is four
                        and four is four │ eight
                        thousand four hundred
                        thirty three is thirty five
                        is ten is three is five is four
wrinkle │ swallow │ darken
dark as the dark of parks
            re │ formative │ sumac’s
            splendid silver gulp
unfill the soil into one place
and name the neighborhood
                        reformation episode
                        landscape as a verb
            faucet water fills the sink
            with as much gasp as ghouls
            are made out of therefore
            don’t be dull and get ghastly
            and dukes up

            •

            Whose dukes?
will say the Lady A
            Who’s blank?
will say the Lady B
                        jerked from the rib
                        of a dark wrinkle of park
            nose-smoke and cross-legged
            <<first_name>> <<last_name>>
                        To what youth
                        is illness not attractive?
privilege of the composite
when the father’s name is rubbed away
from a hospital bracelet on downy wrist
            blue means suicide
            attempt │ manic
            episode │ violent
            outburst │ panic
            attack │ over
dose │ a satin swatch and trophy
            so-called covenant
            community │ depth
            of compost elegy
                        his breath
                        is 3x as hot
                        as our limbs
<<first_name>> <<last_name>>,
            where are your parents?
they have mercy
            Where is your house?
it’s made of money
            Whom have you kissed?
I’ve eaten all your anxiety
            so you may gorge
on folds and downs and mouths
            none of our dental
            records were
            as romanticized
            as the boys
            of minted madness

            •

head-rush
from a red slurp
of cough syrup
some people
have problems
like cowardice
true to the hilt
like youth
but afternoons
we’d get
in groups
to bed and press
shirtlessly
into each other
until we were stuck
with sweat
cool nipples
the only part peeling
away easily
from blades
and spines
kiss intermittent
we wanted
to be loved
badly enough
to do it ourselves

            •

this is as difficult
as a perfect wedge of cake sliced from nothing
                        what it was like and what happened
                        no foamdragon │ no mandragon
we have a two dollar per person
per hour minimum so your friends
have to go somewhere else tonight
            the word was
            de-manicured
                        the pool was never as empty
                                    as when it was empty
            what a joy to take steps four at a time
                        from the subdivision’s center
                        the park spurs into greenbelts
creeks clogged with midges and plastic flags
            what a space for incubation
            logic of memory │memory of <<     >>
the sensation was never
as good as the sensation
I feel a fuzzy cakey fullness
taking up the space this caving mouth makes

            •

                                                            when we first penetrated at the reservoir
                                                            a dead duck washed up
                                                            and I said it was driftwood
                                                            we were so springy we closed
                                                            as soon as we opened
                                                            we stepped into the water
                                                            papery anklets of moony surface
                                                            herons look like backward flying geese
                                                            and not until the bottle is empty
                                                            do we call it a soldier
                                                            to what boy would asking not seem
                                                            unbearably young
would you remind me of spell’s fifteen definitions like the one that means replace
                                                            we left the aperture open
                                                            to stars spooling in their semicircles
high clouds blow out quickly while low ones remind us of leaden things

            •

messiness and the many-fold ELSE
agglutinated glut of acquaintance
and the glut’s on-gone redefinition
Were we in this tree before now?
                        the story’s characters
            like its telling all told at once
                        cross-contaminate
                        a public/less public
the evening that we threw bag-loads of a father’s shredded documents
from the parking garage onto traffic was snapped on a disposable camera
                                                            we wanted to be what they wanted
                                                            to keep out │ either way we wanted
                                                            to be kept in │ from fourteen
                                                            to eighteen I and the other old-eyed
                                    boys would fuck each other against the trees
                                                            of Hunter’s Hill
                                                            the hill that made our parents’
                                                            houses so expensive │ blood
and mud │ messiness and the many-boyed ELSE │ wake up alone
                                    one tree had a coin
                                    with two heads
                                    pounded into it
                                    Were we here
                                    before now?
            you could hear
            the water pulled
            out of the reservoir
pushed through the endless
            sprinkler heads
            causing the sumac wrinkle to bulge and swallow
                                                wrinkle │ swallow │ darken

            •

                        Call the sky cleft palate.
us what │ us Hunters
            grow wooded-in
            cool to morning sherbet
us strawberry
pink with chalky core
                        Call the mountains pigeon-chested.
everybaby wailing
everybaby cooling apart
            now and then now and then
                  │    │     │     │    │
                        Call the Hill Gigantism.
here:                <<                              >>
            that is for your early body
            divined see-through
say:                  My glasses!
                        My glasses!
say:                  I can’t see anything
                        without my glasses! 

           •

            no one’s impressed when           
            you call yourself an atheist
            since everyone’s
            the god of teenagers
no one’s as much a chunk
of mouth as the strawberry
grown in unusual circles
                        the day <<first_name>> <<last_name>> died
                        was the day we did belong to the
                        <<                    >> carpet burn
            what love
            was lorded over
            by us lovely
            springy babies
            with our mouths
            of gluey bolus
            conglobing
                        one by one they moved to the city
                        and named their apartments
                                    Rabbithole
                                    Monkey Mania
                                    Krag
                        such a gamble to trust your body
                                    to remember a body
                        drawn from space’s memory
                                    Hokus Phokus
                                    Globglob
                                    Rhinoceropolis
                        if it were warm we’d pluck
                        every blade of grass and stuff
                        our shirts │ make selves
                                    bestiaries
                                    and make self
                                    simultaneously
                                    bigger

            •

                        at night ELSE’s violence is a gore of roses
            at night the demands
ask to pretend
tell grotesqueries
bid me beware
            ask │ tell │ bid
            and │ tell │ bid

            •

                        at the end of the hall
                        a black light shines
                        on the young one
tooth │ growl │ tooth
eye │ purple │ eye
            yellow slip of brain
            in the reptile’s neck
            which predates the tongue
            by millions of years
                        plucked            the tail flops
                        then                 the tail stops
                                    cold weight of coin
                                    on top of the tongue
the sumac eventually engulfs Lady A
& Lady B until they arrive in its roots
                                                there are spaces
                                    where there is no space
                                    cold weighty story
                        that begins by inhabiting
                                                wooded-in
                        and ends with Hunter
                                                landscaped
                                    from without
                        creekful of slippery
                        midges and flags
                                    mouths with a drainage culvert
                                    ends with another culvert
                        at the furthest point the boys could reach
                        their flashlights landed on a tube of ribcage
                                                quarantine ends
                                                when you can
                                                no longer afford it

            •

                                                pool unpulling
                                                pull unspooling
                                                starry uncurling
                                                from gnarly
                                                molar knot
                                                nodal point
                        everything’s a vortex
                        somewhere
                        somewhere everything’s
                        a vortex │ I mean
                                    What a stupendous
                                    vertigo such slight
                                    hills can have.
            young and mothers
            walk the webbiness of greenbelts
            what were our whereabouts
                        exactly
            babies see through their strawberry patterns
            mealy scoops of little mealinesses
there is a stretch
between desire
and done
            one afternoon
            he played a drum
            like gunshots
            until everybaby
            in Hunter’s Hill
            woke up screaming
scream plunged
dug deep
troubled as thought
            I remember
            only ever waking up once
            and it wasn’t entirely alone