The May First Selected Poet is Temple Salter

Please feel free to email Temple at: saltertemple@gmail.com

THE KNOCKING

Doors that never open or close.
We have our choice to walk through neither.
Onions burst into a pale rose,
beckoning the latest arriver.
I curse hot knobs, I should have known.
My vehemence flies in my saliva.
Wiping off the sticky globs,
she’s always been a cool survivor.

A clarinet torso from bushes and brush,
she quiets us up with shooshes and hush.
The lesson for the day
is nay, is nay, is nay.
Stay the hand and never thrust.

I’m crawling back into that gorge.
It’s still gushing, lying in wait.
Returned from lack of life at large,
it was only fate.
She humps a stump while lessons proceed.
A lump? A bump? A lesion? Smile, children!
No need to weep, one in a millions,
and more and more as we need.

A dragon is too phallic indeed,
but stands in adequate compare.
As treasures lie in stomping sty,
a pig may be less contraire.

The lagoon is stuffed with seed,
once the forest is laid bare,
purified between the whipping sky
and the grave’s dark snickering snare.

We stare and stare and stare,
willing something to come forth.
Hypnotized and robbed of worth
by anything that’s bare.

A swan still has a beak.
You can rip it from her face.
Boil it until it’s soft and sweet
and gobble up her grace.

DOCUMENT

On a desk in the surf, hermits scampering by.
The papers roar with open disgust.
Words trust, but tell errors, rewrite and rewire.
Things made of trees prefer to catch fire.
Speaking, you’re on their turf, writing, you’re flying
in their sky. Tampering with things fortified.
Plowing their cores with lust for story.
Stinging as bees in a clerical glory.
The tide deepens the danger, the ringing ignored.
The moon is a stranger with your memories stored.
Sand grains in the toenail that’s swollen to gross.
Each breeze you utter lingers too close.

THE BLACK BIRD

Veins of land burst invisible claret,
held in black skin diamond adorned pores.
They breathe the gush of traffic rush,
of round vibrato dirty doors.
The home address is the garrote,
a block to lock them in
by carving out their cores.

We’ll eat what lies below.
We’ll eat what flies above.
We’ll chew on our fellow
through expressions of his love.

Eyes pop open, newly formed,
seeking slogans not deformed.
Grocery bag, hashtag, standard norms,
through the wave shaped fallacy storms.

A face becomes a name into.
We walk with tags and shiny shoe.
We deserve rags and poison blue.
We are all hags with grace removed.

Stories go, and so, and so.
What you were you think you know.
Start afar with what you are,
beginning with your brain.

Walls split open imaginable conceit,
sucking down a first splash of stain.
I came forward in my grief,
infected by your altered rein.
Meat made new that comes from meat,
it won’t happen again.

Temple Salter has been published in HelloHorror and in a few other places under other names. His first novel, Umbra, should be coming around any time now. For more details, please
visit templesalter.com.