Alex Lemon is the author of Mosquito (Tin House Books), Hallelujah Blackout (Milkweed Editions), Fancy Beasts (Milkweed Editions), and Happy: A Memoir (Scribner).
His writing has appeared in Esquire, Best American Poetry 2008, Satellite Convulsions, Tin House, AGNI, The Southern Review, and jubilat among others. Among his awards are a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He lives in Ft. Worth, Texas and teaches at Texas Christian University
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WAY OUT WEST
A hard rain will show the secret
In the architecture of bones
Much better than sunlight believe me
Or fractures I promise you
So soaked t-shirts drip like a true skin
While we walk laughing
Down the beach & after the drops stop
Pocking the water the tricks
That play on the growing green then
Bluer waves O blackshark & tigerbelly
Out there Believe me How I wish
I could wrap everything I see
In cellophane & keep it forever in the freezer
This fizzing pier life Arches painted
In a crown of muscle men & clown faces
Red coral lips & russet mustaches
All the finest whisperings of deeper-than-just-flesh
Each sunset something out there
On the horizon looks like it’s waving
An arm going under & down Vanishing
Into the watery sweep & even in
The complete black after
Everything’s slipped from the world’s shelf
A sort of gravelly piano rails
Over the palmtree’s hidden speakers & though I know
Some things believe me
They are so few & stars are burning
Mouths in the sky Believe
Me & the desolation of legs outlined
By a wet blue skirt leave
Never enough time to explain