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by Robert Frede Kenter

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Luck comes in mysterious ways,
shaking mutt faces to siphon miracle bells
these memories of gluing antlers on the deer
at Reindeer Park.
Dear Gasoline, cigarettes, and beer,
Greyhound is shutting down.
In the venomous beard of night, the electric bone marrow
and exit signs for cockroaches,
I plunge my hands into shadow and snow.

This being a song to plugged drains
with an amphetamine pulse and silver oxide crystals,
First symptoms: you left me for your
midnight finality and glass-labeled double-shot.
We were pouring out money hemorrhagic with
our rusting clocks and frozen flowers.
Yes, adieu.

In white and black snapshots,
hands burning with chemicals, in windows,
the ice cap rest-stops and other soul-spilled wounds
churning like it’s Happy Hour sprawled across this pause,
All day-beds you could ever hope to find are
strewn across tinsel city.

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Robert Frede Kenter is a writer and visual artist who lives with ME/FM and whose work is widely published and exhibited. A Pushcart nominee and shortlisted for the Canadian poetry prize (CBC), writing & art appear recently in Watch Your Head, Black Bough, Burning House Press, Cypress, Talking about Strawberries, Anthropocene, Cough, and other venues. Robert is publisher/EIC of Toronto-based Ice Floe Press www.icefloepress.net & author of a recent hybrid collection, Audacity of Form (Ice Floe Press). A chapbook of visual poetry, EDEN, is forthcoming, Autumn 2021, from Floodlight Editions. Robert was a feature reader in 2020 at The Cheltenham Poetry Festival (U.K.). Twitter: @frede_kenter  IG: @r.f.k.vispocityshuffle

 

 

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