Thunder Sandwich  #23

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Pedro Travino-Ramirez

Gravel & Cement


eighteen years of marriage, thirteen prior with steady

outings, infidelity, quiet implications; love, I would


have a career now, not four fucked up kids, and me

in the backseat, drive through Louisiana en route


to Texas: drugrunning cousins, guns, uncle tacho

the spanishpreachergodman-


grooved road, no easy transition to gravel bayouside,

my parents not talking, remembering someone else


                naked, or, your sister, dear,

                your brother, darling



Duration of a Wound


you will be gone soon, décor, ash, ironslag

& cursed automobile, shatteredman:


between highway & headrock, ceremony:

heard you say then, maybe, our dead


are always that way or, off another road,

you'll be like that also-


psychiatric ward, amphetamines, long

time damage, closed casket;


day proceeded by day, no turn leftlane;

you'll be like that also-


scratching your testes and where, old

sun god, did illumination go,


when did lungs rot

instead of breathe



querulous, who


the jazz poetry anthology

is licked by a dark kitten


remember this poem of half-verse & endlines

when you go up in summer spark and can

recall        nothing else of boy & the time

you left me in a shincramp apartment

on a coldwintermountain

of fluctus depression

heighten leveled

by woman-

        and I was mad as dogs too,

        hurling tables, ashbowls

        & jazzanthologies into

        the ether slough,

        under couch,

        into wall,

        through-

remember feathers pillowthreshed found

swept beneath the kitchen & my nails

hung        sting scratching my neck

slightly irritated though grateful

for your wild hair at night after

the fact & your sweethead

against my dark symb-

-olized chest.



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