Anthony Brenton
Anthony Brenton’s forthcoming publications are Morning, Noon and Night in an Apartment; Music for Youngster’s Minds and Greedy Little Animal along with other writings collected over the past years. He is the self-published author of Triskaidekaphobia in St. John’s Muzak and A Book, both reflecting on his environment. Brenton lives in
Anthony Brenton's latest book is Daybreak, Saint City (Trainwreck Press, 2008)
Architectural Morphology
A woman stands
with her head
and most of her body
veiled in clay.
The stump of her right arm
is exposing the moist
circuitry of blood.
The left is a spiral
staircase that winds
to an earth hut
burrowed into her shoulder bone.
Her genitals
constantly running sand.
Every joint is represented
As various varieties
Of apples and plums.
A candle burns in the
grip of the staircase
drying the clay
and her muscular
reflex to the changing
state
begins to crumble
the veil.
And fecundated stomach
glistens through,
jaw with constellations of freckles.
Until she stands naked
screaming at what’s become of her arm.
Bat Larva
There are rodents ground into the floor obviously trampled down
by a large man’s feet left to rot in this room of exploration for something to eat.
And outside in the snow two bats lay on their backs dead claws sprawled
encircling a larval sack.
I put it in a jar…bring it into the warm…put it next to the stove, not too close
and give it some leaves to eat.
My black case holds a scalpel, small maggot surgery…to quietly fault the skin
and let the young bat free. No anesthetic needed there are no nerve endings I can see
though it still squirms and wreathes
from pain or ecstasy.
Wet outside its skin shell…I give him some blood to drink…urge him to use his wings
they still have to dry.
And he grew big through the weeks getting stronger teeth cutting instinct squeaks my martyred wrists leak sliced to the bone to feed him ’til he’s grown.
Eventually all the pills they sell look the same and the friends are cartoons, flailing and dripping ink, slurping and splashing. Monsters with white paper eyes, hollering, fingers sagging. Ecstasy or Middle Eastern wartime mother grief. Tearing through watery sunless skin with black fingernails, a ribald ballet, the Ode to A k9 throat, a ball of ash, a bowl of chow and a stuffed nose. Reading 8:00. Pencils overflowing in a tide of orange, sand and black forests grid and brought to their knees. Screaming at the news, the statistics…numbers, a homespun yarn, a tingling body. Winged screeching quadruped marionette thud and bump at windows closed for the weather, long soft black hair whipping and thrashing with the great exhale, bloodshot eyes spinning and viewing every calculated move, a valor battlefield where the victors bask in domesticity…newspaper weeklies carpet for the porch…teething soothed by television…noodles boiled and fried with vegetables and sauce…screaming at the news breaks on the shores of my feet…the worms that nest and sell pills to anxious customers who bang on every door with pleading words, who ache and shiver spitting on the sidewalk, who don’t remember crimes or why they’re beat up. The marionettes hobble around the base of my house dripping venom from hypodermic fangs scratching their claws against the pavement and weeds…black strings glistening in the moonlight. Knock at the next door, laughs and greetings beat on the shore…five minutes and they’re gone. The four-legged munchers chase dogs and shrews (something to get the stomach working) eyes gleaming and poison pooling at their footpads. I daydream, up here, grand schemes of maddening terror and the pink sky forever rolling over on itself…the math behind time…the champions who wrote history. I see demise and ruination, the loser whose placement is scribed by the new kings…the stringed death approaching, mulling over their plan, the coven of munchers who crawled over sand wastelands…thirsty in the dust bowl…mirages of healthy humans down with mental illness squirming in their own private hells. Images of great oilfields ablaze skin charred and flaking like the result of racial research…the final physician debris…or to be held by high courts, the dissected brains of psychotic youngsters, until their killer is dead, upon the face. Crawling upon four spiderly blood stumps imbedded with sand and glass shards, bullet casings and knives with the blades missing…the skeleton of small old trees ghastly against the horizon. Small animals coming out at night to feed with the terror of their killers standing calm with blood soaked into their uniforms, while soft flesh walks according to orders. They slew 500 men, soldiers well trained with swords and shields but four legs proved too much…venom too rich and pure…slaughtered infants and screaming mothers in dry villages strewn with hair and sopping blood. And upon the popular stage of congregation, naked and wounded, defecating feast of hate and perversion the creator of their reality sits with his scribing machines and onlookers casting the future across the great wasteland of the oncoming army, swaying on strings glistening, on skin blistering and black mane bleaching. And they are upon the house, winged and screeching, thudding and bumping at windows long locked for winter. Black hair savaging the air, with bloodshot marionette eyes spying in. panic on all sides! Tumult, god speaks it! And a bright shattering of glass introduces the four-legged into home. An arm is opened upon a shard and blood splatters across the floor creating frenzy. Like a tranquilizer the skeletonizers enter, like static throughout the body out from needlepoint. They feed him tea boiled from water and the roots and fungus of a four-hundred-year-old tree for numbing his senses. They eat off the skin muscle, leaving tendons, veins, bones and hair the brain is still active as he is skeletonic, remaining receptors dumb, pain is a memory…There is some pure thought, no hope of coming through okay. The last thoughts…“Maybe I should have picked up some candy canes for this Halloween.” Itching
So Perish All Babblers (A Fragment)
Of the ice that contained the skeleton
ancient waters with primitive bacteria and viruses
held deathly vows in their passing years.
A considerably younger multi-year.
‘Prehistoric creatures’
according to the sons of explorers.
And this year like every other is the remains of a polar bear feast old enough to outlive the frozen ice.
Fishermen baiting pots over several winters and springs.
Just speculation,
but it almost looks like they are not sure how they were decomposing before they were frozen.
A medical Sunday night is the kind of night when carrying people,
six members making painting possible, all images automatic,
ashes in
reflections becoming memorable,
holds terrific weight
and meaning.
As many realize that the sun and sky are seen in the searching wakes of one another and you look for five or ten minutes at them, too exact…thoughts long enough to accept the same shriek followed immediately by a transport plain that never actually happened.
Waves folding back into laughter, all hanging in the air like members of an exclusive university.
Spoken chances are the evening but for Sunday night.
And just a minute!
You went down Monday come in a creep down into the simple night and surface again like a different sort of flight team in search of the new plague.
General Milt harking through gray gunmetal…one of the few times they were liars after all.
Signaled an emergency in the
Time wasn’t doing anything but bleeding into the black sky just hovering
divers were standing in time at the airport
a sullen nation of peach groves
within a fence like a child forced when the sky (actually it was a breath) opened up.
A dozen divers declared that it would be all wrong, this return to water.
Tears not dark enough to accept thought.
Immediately the kind of night of some shriek following Sunday.
The skeleton sky is gone to ill health
a state infusion or emission transplant.
Behave fantastic painter
draw it, it will be all-wrong.
The photos in the evening a wood smoke haze.
Spurting mental phallus cracking the seed of a new reality.
Sneezing
Dried bones on the keys with powder lined upon the desk
living the mortal words of hell, desperation
and empty glass next to creams and lined paper
great webs of crystal string weave through my brain
electricity of thought and observation, filing what is and what is fancy
the rubber band of sentient intake and the abstract
sneezing and coughing with 1960’s poster of naked
brother’s obsessive placement of portrait seeds
my gnarled hands shake too much for your work
great munchers gnaw on the sinew of my consciousness and the gradual fading into morning
swarming bees sting and seal the body up with wax
the incessant, maddening chirping of grasshoppers
mongrels yelping and screeching at the break of the sun for food and attention
coca-cola tin can dump into the sidewalk shrubbery
the crash and creaking of large trucks lumbering under hulking weights
taxi drivers snorting and cursing knowing the streets well
harbor tumescent with excrement and the jellyfish are a dim brown
I hear bells…can you hear them?
I hear the horns of boats leaving the dock and the faint rumble of the drinkers on board
great chimes held by monsters and ferries with dainty and dreadful hands alike
held by soft nails and talons alike
sifting dust to the ground to be eaten up by the pathetic and starving needy
to be sniffed by the vast nostril into the brain
to be cooked up and shot in the mainline
knocking on doors 4:43 AM…on the wrong door to scared occupants, nervous of aggressive strangers
to shake in the morning with chemical head and reaction body
watching the cat dissolve into cubes.
Then the ultimate stay of convalescence
where the floors have no patterns
the windows are grid with steel
and the doctors and nurses treat you with cool detachment.
