1.
at cracked marrow
of the double yellow line
extraction crane
buckles
down bare fork prong
crookless end of extendable arm
clumsy strikes sparks
to reattach its own
claw
2.
minor repair membrane of day heals
back failed surgeries sutures anneal just
to number and name conglomerate penultimate
not hemoglobin
not protrusion inclusion
3.
The static of my morning radio leftover from the Big Bang
4.
from wobble of molar to inflammation of diverticula to titanium
bar at fracture of tibia
5.
splitting of Pangea— slippery footprint a bloody
Band-Aid between two bricks
6.
‘disjecta membra’ – your notes in my copy
of “The Iliad”
7.
‘sharps’ nurses call them one severed her tendon the fiber
rose up the wrist accidentals outside the sonic body its cacophonous
future adjusts to the ear all the slack
of her broken harp
8.
connoisseurship—matching decapitated torsos
to looted heads
9.
tongue snail without shell muscular
foot in the mouth there is no relax for you
but death
10.
not even the body can be agreed upon
11.
broken mosaic crawling from
the underworld like the sack
of Byzantium
12.
just the inverted head and one paw
nothing to put back together all wholly
apart groundhog reapportioned
by coyotes
13.
bright pane
of moth wing hauled off by ants
14.
‘precursors’— are they curses before the outrage?
15.
shoals of the streambed current seeded with shells
turned and tipped in the shallows in water lights
some break from the braid walk away hermit-ed
reinhabited
16.
one hand reaching
behind an other’s knee one reaching
toward chin
Judson Evans is co-author, with poets Susan Berger-Jones & Gale Batchelder, of the collaborative book of poems Chalk Song–inspired by paleolithic cave paintings–Lily Poetry Press, Boston, 2022, and author of Gear–his collaboration with videographer Ray Klimek–Meshwork Press, Wilkinsburg, PA, 2021, as well as one of the authors of what weathers/ what remains: An Anthology of the Broadmore Haiku Collective, edited by Kristen Lindquist, Red Moon Press, 2023. He teaches full-time in the Liberal Arts & Sciences Dept. at Berklee College of Music, and is co-Editor (with Lew Watts ) of Haibun for the Haiku Society of America journal Frogpond. He was chosen as an “Emerging Poet” by John Yau for The Academy of American Poets in 2007. His poems have appeared in American Poet, Folio, Volt, CutBank, and Laurel Review.