Adam Tedesco
Claque’s Balance Sheet
All of us sky-kissers
everything calques the sun
revolves around the unseen
louse of the market
Air chunked with industrial rasp
foreclosed-on mollusks
approximate the undertow
One face subtracts the other
Time like crystals
grown in an open mouth
bleeding edge come to hush
Will we bite our tail again this year?
New limbs grow numb
trellised on the calcified
Stone collapsing under its own weight
or what the back will bear
Nothing is ever not talking
over the firing squad
the quieting snow
sounds of holding money
Reemergence of the Karner Blue
You are encouraged to destroy the art hanging on our walls.
These are your walls too.
Yes. We are an institution and you,
you will always be what you are.
This is not a bad situation, just not as we had planned.
Days are not as long as we would like.
Our mouth is never big enough to hold a simple word.
Please consider the endless possibilities of honey.
There are many forms of life we can’t keep out.
You are encouraged to destroy our walls.
You are encouraged to foster an environment of positivity.
Endangered butterflies are repopulating on our grounds.
Please pardon our dust.
New home construction is rebounding.
You are encouraged to produce great works of art. We have
been in the pretzel business for over seventy-five years. Please
dispose of your waste.
We know who you are.
Please observe a moment of silence.
You are encouraged to clean the floor.
Once in a decade an opportunity such as this one presents itself.
Please strike the record.
It’s illegal to know (what’s happened over time)
Say tomorrow is never
a piling, cage or buttress
fog becomes homogeneous
by the time it reaches here
where it occurs to me
perhaps I forgot some gear
along my way to the top
metal stars & their original tension
have vanished, fanciful
bugs parading below
To think I still know you
is a shroud flapping
against the scaffold’s uprights
my dialectical concern
a winding yarn to slub
& bricks to stack
a jail wouldn’t have these
eyebrows with teeth
In going down I discovered
what equipment did I lack
was a stronger contact
with the thickness of things
those fat brushes working
in the daubers’ mud
play me Tequila
on your death bell still
Something has happened
already in small pockets
of breath’s simplicity
& in the end of a painting
where once the sun appeared
it looked terrible
a poorly drawn distance
from your long grey foreground
Adam Tedesco is a poet and video artist living in Upstate New York. His video poems and site-specific work have been shown at MoMA PS1, No Nation Gallery, and other venues. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Conduit, Diagram, Fence, jubilat, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of several chapbooks, including Misrule (Ursus Americanus), and the full-length collection Mary Oliver (Lithic Press).