Aswim with Happiness

Our ideas leap like fish upstream
to spawn and die in
sunlight

their backs
flecked with blood
their eyes ruinous and open.

Kingdoms

Clouds stream from hilltops
across the valley like
shredded

flags—
my own breath torn
wordless in the same cold wind.

Empty and Full

Trash in the street so
stinkingly much
more

vivid
when I clear the
garbage from my mind.

Undoing

Years I ran my heart counter-
clockwise to find you
to keep time

from taking
me away from you
wound it backwards to now.

 

John Brehm is the author of Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press, and of a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press. He is a freelance writer and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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