four poems
and in the morning when i rise
I will build you a small house and I will fill it with many birds. I will take out all of my teeth and plant them in the ground. I will make them into gloves. I will make you a hat from them. It will always be smiling. You can sail it away on a river I will make of our floorboards. I will make breakfast. I will look out the window and it will strike me that there is always something about the movement of clouds that I don’t know if I will ever understand.
don't think twice it's alright i swear
I was downstairs and drinking a glass of water and I was thinking. She called down the stairs to ask what I was thinking about. I thought I heard a dull thud. I made my way upstairs, where she was standing over the bed, choking the life out of me. I was then stuffed under the bed, where it seemed quite a pile was growing. I asked if I had just seen her choking the life out of me. She said No. You saw me doing no such thing she said. I asked if she was hiding anything and she said no. What about under the bed. Do not she said Look under the bed. Not under any circumstances she said. I asked what was under the bed and she said there were buckets under the bed. I asked her what was in the buckets and she told me that they were full of tears. I asked her why they were full of tears and she just looked at me. What about behind the window I said. Behind the window and across the street there were four kids standing around with sheets on their heads. They were standing perfectly still. I could hear their feet moving. I could hear their sheets rustling. I could hear the wind move through them. I could hear their breathing. I could hear it carried up to me on the arms of the wind through the open window and she heard it too and the world seemed to stop for an instant. The world became a sharp intake of breath, and it marched forward. The kids marched forward. Our bones walked out of our mouths and joined them.
my mouth is full of trouble
I watched the clouds circle the moon in the sky and I listened as said sky filled with hands clapping. I stood there as the clouds drowned the moon. I once drowned in an ocean of tears. When I came back I could grow teeth like a shark does which is one after another and my supply was inexhaustible in that it never got tired. Using these endless teeth I carried on conversations with my betters. Because of this I was dragged off in several different directions by several wild horses at the same time. I was dragged to a far off land in war time. In this land every soldier wrote their life story on a piece of paper and swallowed it in their mouths. When they lost their lives their breath left their body and as it left it took the notes on the wind where they found their way home.
some things such as i've never seen before
There were kids in the yard holding a box. What do you have there I said to them. They said nothing. They said Go away. They said Go fuck yourself. They said Please leave us alone and they said it with their eyes. I reached over to grab the box from them but their arms and backs and heads wrapped around it. I went inside and climbed the stairs to the roof. I opened the door to the roof and dragged the bench to the end of the roof and I stood on the bench and looked down onto the alley and the kids had the box and I said to them Don't open that box and they looked up at me like Go away like Fuck you like Please please please leave us alone won't somebody just let us be and let us have what we want to have. When they opened the box little clouds came up on out of their mouths and their bodies crumpled up like paper and a magician walked out of the box and gathered up what he could while he could before the wind blew them away and he folded the ones he managed to keep into paper airplanes and he sent them on up into the sky where they sailed too close to the sun and caught on fire. He had folded one or two up in his pocket for safe keeping and then they caught on fire too and his suit caught on fire too and he caught on fire too and that is why you don’t take things that belong to somebody else isn't it now isn't it.
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Sasha Fletcher's novella WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS AND WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS is due out from ml press in December of the year 2010. Sasha is an MFA candidate in poetry at Columbia University in the city of New York.
