Muzzle flash paths a bullet through pith to pit, brain halved. In his hometown, in a field, in brush with the scent of deer, surrounded by azaleas, we found him and slept next to him. In moonlight we clutch his corpse. Get the birds. Get us in a grove with nightjars to take him elsewhere, where no one else will see. Rename us: has-beens. Protriptyline talked him out of his body. We search the gutfuls of dirt between us and find an animal in amber. A pill. A casing. His bullet-brawn. Not him. His closed casket closes our eyes to what he’d done to his body. We each have two eyes toward the past, which turns away. Swing that world dead ahead. Insomnia waits for us: wants to dream.
"The foundation of Belieu’s language, and also its primary defense, is paradox—the symbiosis of apparent opposites. The poems create insinuations in order to undermine them: the 'wrong idea' might, a beat later, be the 'right' one. The trapped speaker wonders if she didn’t set her own trap."
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"Real poetry, Itō reminds us, doesn’t only come from a poet simply saying something—it also comes from the ways that the poet resists the ordinary processes of saying. The writer unlocks new potential by subverting, manipulating, and defamiliarizing the patterns that structure our logic and expression. Poems need to be more than a series of simple, ordinary statements strung together."
