Tocsin

we are gun range identical she swears
she divines her daughter swiped as full proof
the ships blast out of the marksmen’s barrels

& it shouldn’t be relative to any foreign port
i am 83 a suitcase unzipped
she becomes the flex of my dumbbells

this armada is an intuitive herd
obsessed with dna our multi-locus
charge finger-spooked going deeper             digital

raiding octopi zones          we negotiate
the roundness of bubbles & the lids
choking our brew some of it is guanine

some of it is mud drop a guitar in my chest
& the hole is a buoy            my technique to parrot
his orders & scramble on cue midwatch   i imagine

her placentas trailing the rudder to Italy salt
ruck waves lash unbounded
against my hands

Phenakistoscope Mis-Hire

The teenagers breadcrumb their egos
as if the ducks blitz the locked gate. Two squeeze
on the Palomino. They want fathers so bad they cut

the lines begging their friends to record
the carousel spin on a thumbtack: sick

of the barefoot children in the latex
house; sick of lugging these sandbags,
sick of putting the garden snake

in the trash can; another contestant spat
and I keep the mirror still to gauge the torque.

All swamp beyond the fence.
When you get tired of counting air, curve

the pitcher’s strikes and tell him he’s a fool
if he lets you walk.

Conniption Rhetoric

Just for your context, each tangram
in the lab is under a slavish copy
then lined by the rows of computers
between her rainbow stripes wrapped
around it, an arbor by lip. My triangle skin, no
sleep this way. Pump me an elephant
dose of propofol for this set. She twists the knurled kombucha
cap, macadamia nuts for tonight. My decisions
are the leaping apes
on my graphs if you saw
the algorithm to get here. Energy. Cortisone
shots. Grate this bone data into spicule:
medieval/transduction/king.
No summit in my confession.

Maya C. Thompson is a writer from Maryland. Her poems have appeared in The Shore, The Tusculum Review, and The Scarab. Her research on Ruth Muskrat Bronson has appeared in the Recovering Democracy Archives.