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From the Canal

Something breathes
on a dead deer
and the hair inside its ears
wave

Headlights and
rubber

Water fills the black eyeholes that keep seeing everything reflected back from skidding
black macadam

Someone cut your feet off

Someone moved your leg across the street

Someone whistled

Giving birth
you give birth to steam
and maggots

Strange new butterflies

Poet Michael Dickman's second collection of poetry, Flies, received the 2010 James Laughlin Award

About Michael Dickman

Themes

Animals

About this Poem

"This poem is part of a longer sequence of poems whose origins come from time spent along the D&R Canal in New Jersey. Have you been there? You should go. Despite the violence in the poem it is a dazzlingly beautiful place. And only one hour from Penn Station!" —Michael Dickman

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More by this poet

Broadway

The last taxi cab on earth 
glides past without any help 
& breathes 
through crystal sac 

Air in flukes or  
upside down water 
in a glass

Where we come from 

Sliding paper doors reveal repeating mountains clouding against the western sky 

Busses are re-routed 
using a feedback loop that also effects 
the real ferns & rain 

I was loved & looked out the window through rain and kids
	 
Orange roe  
connected by telephone & span 
picks up passengers for free
& drops them downtown 

Mica in coral 

A replacement shoal parked along the

Michael Dickman

2019

Killing Flies

I sit down for dinner
with my dead brother
again

This is the last dream I ever want to have

Passing the forks 
around the table, passing 
the knives

There's nothing to worry about

One thing I want to know is who's in the kitchen right now if it isn't me

It isn't me

The kitchen is full of flies, flies are doing all the work

They light on the edge
of the roasted chicken
The bone china

That's what they do

Light


*


I will look 
more and more like him
until I'm older
than he is

Then he'll look more like me

if I was 
lost

The flies need to be killed as soon as we're done eating

Michael Dickman

2011

Emily Dickinson to the Rescue

Standing in her house today all I could think of was whether she took a shit every
morning

or ever fucked anybody
or ever fucked
herself

God's poet
singing herself to sleep

You want these sorts of things for people

Bodies and
the earth
and

the earth inside

Instead of white
nightgowns and terrifying
letters


*


Here she comes 
her hands out in front of her
like a child flying
above its bed
at night

Her ankles and wrists held tightly between the fingers of some brightly lit parent home
from a party

Michael Dickman

2010

Poems

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From the Canal

More by this poet

Broadway

Killing Flies

Emily Dickinson to the Rescue

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