A fleeting aversion to our foolish angles
day again resolves around the cruelest angles.
This heart is tall grass wind-sheared
at the nodes bent over ruthless angles
sounding a calligraphy, we might comprehend
but for the ability never to speak our truest angles.
Not hating the beautiful war then finds us
cracking now our skulls on newest angles.
Rain-black clouds open orchid-like spooling
out their contrast of bluest angles.
Who wants to live forever as we are now
traced, Brock, by only our most brutish angles?
Dream in Which the City’s Destroyed
Our city’s turning to dust. Witness the collapses from an upper window: our city
destroyed by fire. This city. Ours. Not fire in the elemental sense, but as firefight. As
in, combat. As in, war. Firepower like we’ve never seen in 15 years of fighting. Like
I’ve never. Endless stream of tracers cuts buildings at the knees and they crumble. All
of them. A coming rumble. To dust. It’s clear it’s coming for us. No one speaks. No
time to know. No time to say. A rumble this bodily can’t be. Firepower like this can’t
be. This crumble. This disintegration. We fall, we debris. I now alone in my falling. This
rubble of falling. I cover my head: effortless the passing. This return to dust.
Brock Jones is the author of Cenotaph (University of Arkansas Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Lunch Ticket, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of English at Utah Valley University.
