Shanna Compton


We’re loving it.

A blue photograph of course contains sky.
It was taken from a car window.

A push upward during a movement forward.
Stripes flick through the asphalt sling.
What’s passed unseen.

What’s remarked.
All that’s never said, needs to be said.
Images lined up rows. Hoarded for later.

Night arcs add to a continuous sense
of April, of this year. Please welcome.

To the pink pages, thank you.
Thank you parasol. Thank you fuzzy voiced
at the mike. Thank you ice in a glass.

The road is a method, or a line joining
one possible former with a likely latter
like a ladder.

And yes, the sky is blue.
& it can be photographed.

Our official position is class piñata.
Our innermost breaks.


The Bloody Intellect

What has she done
with her white feathered dressing gown
her getaway rococo as dream?

Misplaced her tongue
along a redundant ear in error,
in sorrow, with intent.

Beginning with white
is to erase the body,
silence the voice, blank the self
to receive the costumes it consumes.

Potted plants stand in trios,
pointed & pruned. Trained
with snipping & ties.

So public a face, hers,
it hardly belongs.
A camera. All poses. All lies.

-both poems previously published at Dusie


In half-asleep love

I hush the peaches
the darkened kitchen
eerily clean in the
stainless gleam of the
fridge and stove
redoubling the bounce.
The cat bootlegs some
chow bleating like
some other animal,
ripping at the carpet
with an alien noise.
He’s a shroud of a pet.
Earlier we barhopped,
avoided the jiffy algebras
of shifting seats at tables
by simply leaving.
A door functions both ways.
Open for water.
Open for air.


Even A Zoo

The dawn arrived and the plums fell.
We were both naïve and bold.
Down it dropped into fields of saffron.
Like flakes in winter triumph
in the face of shine on snow
the sand conditions things
for change or burial.
Who knows? The camels of this caravan
might expand into cheap memories
in the national language.
But there is more to me than this.
183,000 pampered miles more
and in great condition.


Bubble Up

Blue drunk on applejacked burst
bulbs the buzzed of lower lawns mown
down the gullet with a POD glossy cover
galley of thighs ricochets impromptu
critique with sexy no coverup fleshy
bareness! it's spring in Brooklyn
and we're all poets everybody
I am you are babies dogs
their walkers and nannies the mailman
the barber whole pack of teen bangers
the dude going Dirty Fruit! Dirty Fruit!
something it took me years
to learn suddenly clear:
poems at no charge here

-all three previously published at Coconut Poetry