A DOZEN NOTHING ROBERT KRUT.March 2016 A dozen poets. One a month. Nothing More.

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Eileen Conley
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1 ROBERT KRUT.March 2016 A dozen poets. One a month. Nothing More. THE ALMIGHTY IS A KLIEG LIGHT This curve of sky, the inner landscape of my eye the moon, my pupil in reverse. Your eyes are my eyes and in my hand, your heart, a useless onion. Stop staring at the necklace around my heart made of human fingers, threaded knuckles. My fist is made of a million knuckles I will knock a sermon out of you if it kills me. Not hillside, but a stub-toe- sermon a crushed letter with kidnapper s lettering. Hidden behind litter roadside every street lamp in the world is one of my million eyes. Step into the moon -negative I ll never find you no matter how many craters I make looking.

2 ROBERT KRUT.March HEART HOLDS LAKE Lakeside, I crouch still enough light before night, the reaching branches reflect to make a shimmer-wreath around the water s border. A mockingbird holds bark, builds an altar, whether it realizes that fact or not. A beetle works its way between the chips. I remove my left hand, set it on the water, watch it glide across the surface until it is out of view. Next, my right ear, then feet, forearm, ankle, rib cage Until all that is left is my heart in my open palm, along the water finding its way out, seems to rise like a torch of blood then sinks to the bottom of the lake.

3 ROBERT KRUT.March I LL BE YOUR KEEPSAKE I m in the box, along with your thousand unstamped letters and termites crawling over their ink. Fingerprints lift themselves from my hand, stretch out like a line of music, and away. I told you it would all lead to this. My chest is merely a cabinet for a mason jar holding chalk conversation hearts smashed into a fine powder. Once, the tattoo across my forearm told you how I feel but I can t move to read it anymore. Please, recite it by memory, please. I want to remember believing something, even if I cannot move to it to do so.

4 ROBERT KRUT.March THE BRANCH There is too much death and rain this year. You would hope one would cancel the other out, in some karmic double negative no such luck. It has been raining for a week, and you ve been dead for two days. Today is Thursday, and finally, an arm of sunlight holds back the storm. The tree beside, above, and over our building lost a branch and now it s on the rooftop, rain matting its leaves into a hundred shocked eyelids. I stare at the phantom limb, with clouds now just out to sea, open mouths of water collected in pavement pockmarks. The branch will stay there a week a great trophy of the rain wars big enough to notice, not big enough to warrant a rush removal. By then, the branch will have dried out long ago, a chalky skeleton the leaves, fossils traced onto the floor, binding it all together an elaborate scaffolding of spider webs tying the branch down, anchoring it in place beneath their tent, a hundred of them shuffling along, tie it tightly, tightly rewarding themselves with a dinner of trapped earwigs in the branch s finger. So much web, it looks like a cotton body, pulled apart

5 ROBERT KRUT.March and laid to rest on the wood, and as the sun lunges with its last rays the whole contraption sparkles and the spiders appear to disappear and I stare into that cloth diamond until it is dark, and all movement stops for the day, and all I can think for that night and past will be how much I wish I had taken you up there with me.

6 ROBERT KRUT.March BOMB THE SUBTEXT When the windows blew out, the frame was a broken jaw, busted lip bleeding into the house. Shards of glass on the floor, confetti for the taking, and our skin, spotted with it, stinging, raw. There are no secrets left, everything is through a bullhorn and the shadows bleached. While we cower in the bathtub, whisper a prayer for the unsaid, for all our teeth set squarely in our mouths.

7 ROBERT KRUT.March ROBERT KRUT Robert Krut is the author of This is the Ocean (Bona Fide Books, Winner of the 2012 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize), as well as The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, both in print and online. A chapbook, Theory of the Walking Big Bang, was published by H_ngm_n Books in 2007; subsequently, he began serving on the press/journal s Editorial Board. He lives in Los Angeles, and teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. More information can be found at

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