Spooky Boyfriend #5
Oil Cloth Thrown Over Crumb Forest
“Practice” yoga in the corridor,
the way you can “make” peace or
“keep” customs.
Compulsive,
worked up about buffalo,
the market off Old Pillow Road,
lamentations of forests.
Keep commitments.
It seemed to me just like me.
Standing in the milkweed by the fence at 7:
first time in trouble at school and I saw the game-
like possibilities of everything,
the principles of
and the roughness really.
It has been done before: the woman with two swords
Who has my gold rings,
my white guitar? I know.
My interest in numbers,
what has passed. Draw
my face on rock in gold.
I’m not interested in talking
about it in the poems.
So long town,
your smoke-ragged hills
won’t be the rawness of me.
Elisa McCool is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She edits the irregularly produced journal Come Hither, and her work has appeared in Skanky Possum, a Parvati Press broadside, WOMB, and is forthcoming in Ekleksographia. Some of her favorite things include: getting letters, breakfast, and writing poems with the Washtenaw County Women's Poetry Collective and Casserole Society.
Something Spooky: She periodically had bats flying around her bedroom this past summer. Spooky, but not in a good way.
*Author's note: These two poems are homages to Ted Berrigan and include cut-ups/reworkings of an interview he did with George Macbeth.
