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Hugh Behm-Steinberg

from an end is the towards to

The opening men and women in more of those crowns;

those old days wake and die as a crew of uncoverings.

Your suit’s a cloud they hire you when they’re thirsty.

Or about music which is money or farflung cornering

anything emotional or having to do with your legs:

descending indulges blocks another to do it do it do it

do it and don’t stop keep on getting created by animals

kneeling, by trauma, by whether they’ll imprint upon you

or hold onto their wildness and how you’d reciprocate

that gift by wondering who stole it from you first.


 


Compulsory ceiling, make eggs, be in the torsion of

caretaking a carnival, nobody gets to stick around. The

living to haunt you a talk in your sleep it’s loving

that’s ok that’s a mistake but it’s also okay it’s

really necklacing now see it breaks down it builds

fires all day the straw feeding unwreckable economies

it’ll work without getting paid it’ll work the same way every time.

It’s yours to keep saying yes and a flare, a true shard,

unpronounced the beautiful more to stay responsible

and free so you can teach others how.


 

Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press), as well as three Dusie chapbooks, Sorcery, Good Morning! and The Sound of Music. Poems from an end is the towards to have appeared in or are forthcoming in such places as Otoliths, Moss Trill, Under a Warm Green Linden, E-Ratio and Word/forWord, among others. He's a steward in the Adjunct Faculty Union at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where for ten years he edited the journal Eleven Eleven.

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