Voices Elsewhere

shift like insects and the roof moves,
the roof moves as it melts its ice
ten years long;
the hair of a woolly mammoth while thunder tears the morning

Their mouths, it seems, are covered in moss, fungus,
the fingernails of the dead
scratching like rats in the oven

One cellar drops its load of water
onto the floor
and the balloon lifts into the white sky,
the anchor punches through the sail,
twins emerge as one flailing bunch into the universe,
the sweat of murderers conjures the summer
into being with guns and violence,
and the winter whines like hemlock
or a door

propped open at the mouth.
Bells in the wooden wind.
The skeletons dance in their graves and make noises of their ages.
Relatives fear the memory of their sons and daughters.

Lulu greets her Master
with a mum, a strange box made of coal, a firearm,

where
under this grass is the slow grin of the future? It is
an irrelevant corpse.

Jingling her red tea into the palms of our hands, the burn of
frost on the lips, one stone moved underneath ground
tens of thousands of years old
oh no

Soldiers return home dead. It is a nightmare, and I wish I
meant that
literally.