Bret Shepard
Physical Retail
Every stove is a complex system of human suffering.
How to sell your home: forget everything
you know about the violence of strangers and replace
that violence with upgraded appliances. Do we not
replace our hearts with other images? We do
our best to not replicate its beatings
when we see the face of someone arousing, the face
of someone who wants to tear our skin
from the body and wear it to dinner
only to say we are in a relationship,
the physical retail brought to you by desire.
Every stove is a trigger
to the past and in those moments we look around
the room for some stranger to pull it.
The violence with upgraded appliances
shimmers under the recessed lighting of a ceiling
pushing more toward the floor everyday. Do we
replicate the heart to eventually live without it?
The kitchen is quite warm this July, the weeks
where even wasps suffocate,
where every heart is a stove heating itself into flame.
Coast
No side of you in sight
at the parade, the flood
covers streets. It’s all
one process. The ocean
grew a city. The city
then became an ocean
waves of bodies invade.
No life remains static.
Everything wedges you.
It overlaps in circles
the size of sky, shrouds
the body so precisely
you can’t see, takes
a grainy picture you get
in the mail weeks later,
wherein you almost look
like one million other
faces look when seeing
one side of you, absent
any return address.
Zen and the Organic
I have never started a campfire
that didn’t turn into a disaster
the size of Alaska, how flames
spread across my mind. I can’t
name all the trees in my yard,
but I can talk my way up them.
Some drugs, the more you want
to unawaken into the sharp dark
a forest offers in the near winter.
I’ll travel to the coastal range
to leave with a patch stitched
to my forehead. No place quiet
enough to take apart thoughts,
pills purify the un-seeable
bacteria in the water. Metaphor
for simile, down to the organic,
its stock photo, I look around
the dim earth to eventually see
one real apple blossom.
Elegy with a middle seat
After it all, a few friends and family, some poems
can never be more than the poems around them,
the entire crowd, a basket of words to ingest.
It is the same experiment with family members.
We have reasons Emily Dickinson never traveled
further than she did. Or we think we do,
as we consider her personal life, her unseen parts
we describe with theories. We also have ways
of not traveling our distances. We have talks
about other people, the interior struggles
we loosely attribute to this or that thing we heard,
an oral history built communally. This terrifies me.
The armrest debate begins on the tarmac, extends
the sky’s miles. I need to think about things.
I need to think about things outside this airplane.
I need the shadows of the pine trees at dusk
and what I have is shadows from the overhead
reading lights, thinking about Emily Dickinson
in the middle seat of a plane moving west,
two people squeezed around me, turbulence
touching us together in intervals. It raises
deathly images with these strangers and how not
touching takes more time to forgive than touching.
My friend Morgan wears superhero t-shirts.
My friend Spencer wears overalls and is sincere.
My friend Chris wears a confident leather jacket.
Something means more when you’re less happy.
I consider the people seated next to me. I consider
whether or not they are my family for a few hours,
strangers positioning their shapes onto my own,
or if they are people paying to avoid themselves.