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Evan Stephens Feb 2024
We knew him well before the fall -
before the nights when the only stars

were the dying ones whose darkling scrawls
slouched into the bedtime bar

to perish with a knowing wink,
smothered in an iceless drink;

before his slippery smiles
were filled with gravel,

before the many tired trials,
& clapping gavels;

we knew him well before the fall,
before he shook us off to crawl

into those tents of blue and gluey smoke
crowding every corner

with the lies he claimed were jokes.
We all felt like secret mourners

of the boy we knew so well -
or thought we did, before he fell.
Feb 2024 · 249
Major Arcana: 0. The Fool
Evan Stephens Feb 2024
I hear it's going to snow tonight,
& untamed words run through my skin,
but I don't think I'll write -

snow may smear to tussled white,
but we're such fools for indoor sins
that if it's going to snow tonight

we'll stay in, turn low the light
until the walls are dim and thin...
I don't think I'll write

or hew you little metered sleights
of hand, more smoke than djinn -
No, if it's going to snow tonight,

sun sluiced away in spite,
sky low and gray and blank as tin,
then I don't think I'll write:

these crawling words are feeling trite
& the bedsheets gather in a grin.  
It's going to snow tonight,
but I don't think I'll write.
Villanelle
(A1,b,A2
a,b,A1
a,b,A2
a,b,A1
a,b,A2
a,b,A1,A2)
Feb 2024 · 119
Winter City
Evan Stephens Feb 2024
We winter creatures, here in the streets
under the cloud flat, the moon-press,
are bound to our random anywhere points,

with interior images in each: loves, agonies,
strangers we met for a close moment -
the world is filled with us, seeded with us...

The air is cold, it gathers around the mouth.
Dying wisps of speech arch up and away
in small hoods of steam and intention.

Rain digs into my cheek like teeth.
This street is an echo of the next street,
& it's papered with names, so many names.
Jan 2024 · 118
Falling Back Into Things
Evan Stephens Jan 2024
All things change to fire,
and fire exhausted
falls back into things.
-Heraclitus


Black block grove and glade -
it's all translated to wet geometry

by the patina of the rain slant...
It's like a spell has been laid on this place.

We are those without bedtimes,
the quick pestles of clocks grind

past Friday night into Saturday,
the sky tinted, louched:

greening cloudy wash wringing
opals into the late softened minutes.

Things fall back as they were before:
night dissolves in the cold window hood

until the only dark things left are hands,
unstill under sheets of morning lake.
Second draft
Dec 2023 · 463
Winter Triolet
Evan Stephens Dec 2023
"Winter's almost here,"
the wind maintains.
Open all the wine and beer,
winter's almost here
& cold will reign -
"winter's almost here,"
the wind maintains.
ABaAabAB

Working back into smaller forms
Dec 2023 · 107
Sonnet to the Little Birds
Evan Stephens Dec 2023
The birds are rioting - dispelled
in a shudder from the arm
of the fog-headed elm that splays
towards fresh pins of frost,
wind spoons them down to grass.
O little birds, I too am pulled -
a branching ardor folds and flays
my days to nights. Her easy charm
spills across me and I'm as lost
as the brittle leaf-eye that last
breaks from the tree into new winter...
The birds fork to ledge or hedge
as I walk on - my unruly center
tamed and shaped to urgent pledge.
ABCDE ACBDE FGFG
Dec 2023 · 169
At Sonny's
Evan Stephens Dec 2023
The early blurry dark tar drape,
the annihilating television sky -
under it, we're drifting floes

in a snow-veined river as winter
shadows slum through a beetle-browed
rowhouse valley, all the stars frozen

& ****** away by slow and humid glow.
Tomorrow's rain belongs to tomorrow -
tonight's pattern is hot and pink,

like something simmering just underneath
tautly-sheeted strokes of skin.
Must all our poisons be so sweet?
Nov 2023 · 522
Sonnet on Two Concerts
Evan Stephens Nov 2023
Swig and swim in dimming seethe,
plastic cup palomas, beers held
close to chest as voices lap
up steeply to black rafters.
Standing close, I feel you breathe
under my hands, and swell
with music, ribbon-wrapped
in clap and laugh.
These nights, they roll on in wild waves:
we're falling bed into bed,
our touch like breaking bread
before a feast where nothing's saved
for later - not a single bite...
Then day rises cold and wet and white.
ABCD ABCD EFFE GG
Nov 2023 · 224
Sonnet for a Late Night
Evan Stephens Nov 2023
I'm pulled down the boulevard,
the shining hide of the hired car
reflecting all the salted yellow blots
that fringe the crashing air.
Speckled city, I climbed her stair
when the night grew late and taut:
I embraced all the darkest angles
of her room, the candied tangles,
the breasted murmurs, the knot
made of half-started words,
until the mind got waxy, slurred
by louche, unchaperoned thoughts...
O car, this hour with desire's bruised -
if you take me back, I won't refuse.
AAB CCB DDB EEB FF
Nov 2023 · 163
Sonnet to a Cloud
Evan Stephens Nov 2023
O cloud head, loping with raw rain,
take this breath in your breezy ferry
street by street into the east,
where she sits cradled in lamplight
while fistfuls of autumn's mane
slap across brick dark as sherry.
O cloud head, kneaded and greased
by the blue fingers of humid night,
give over my breath and tell her
I'll be waiting for tomorrow
to reclaim it from her parted lips;
tell her that my brain purrs
with fever, and every red borough
of my body still feels her insistent grip.
ABCD ABCD EFG EFG
Nov 2023 · 761
"Aspera Ad Astra"
Evan Stephens Nov 2023
A mouse broke its bones
on my neighbor's floor;
I was called in mercy,
as the angel of slaughter.
My heart was the water
in which it drowned.
Days later, the wound
closed when I met Circe:
my silverish lion's stony
fringe burned away in smolder.
I left her starry thigh,
her eyes like cask strength rye;
They live, we sleep - No,
we're awake and night is slow.
ABCDDEECABFFGG
Oct 2023 · 376
New Face at the Rugby Cup
Evan Stephens Oct 2023
O rebel angel in the whitest shirt,
with a smile's arrow in a quiver of air,
I'll down this whisky now and flirt:
blotted, besotted, bleary, bared.
After rugby cup the talk converts
to banana slugs and wine-sea hares,
& when you exit to a silvered next
I don't wait at all to ask about you.
Our hosts' reply, uncanny quick as a hex,
etched in glassy-cheeked tattoo:
I already know I'll send a text.
I leave and ease a dream, the eaves askew...
Now dawn jitters in on dewy, burnished feet,
swinging over sleepy skirt of new-born street.
ABABAB CDCDCD EE
Oct 2023 · 187
Tsundere, Too Slowly
Evan Stephens Oct 2023
Glazy rain snakes, are you lost,
wending in tandem on the pane's cheek?

You avoid my finger as I trace
your lacing knits of past and future.

I'm newly home from the pine bar,
curdled litany of flirtations

shed like a salted witch's skin.
I don't know why I do it to myself,

but the curiosity rises in me every time.
O rain, breaking and beading

on the glass lip, on the night loop,
I'm holding out my empty hand

to you, a midnight plea in hush:
teach me your way of cutting cloud

& slipping to streak an autumn eve
until you find that smiling smear

who tastes you just for fun?
The moon is shapeless tonight,

& all their eyes are locked in wax;
I'm impatient to make coffee for two.
Tsundere is a Japanese word for a plot where a character with an initially cold or hostile personality slowly becomes friendly and opens up. What if it's too slowly?
Oct 2023 · 157
Chariot
Evan Stephens Oct 2023
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

-Emily Dickinson


Each body has its own agenda:
Her? Her criss-cross brain flings

scrawls of knuckled candlelight
across the mystery of his face.

Him? His bursting nerves waver,
tremble on the blue patio

where her dress is ascending.
Leaves rug the streets under

coffeed eyes that survey it all
before scoring down the lane.

Murderers must be walking by;
lovers sending frantic texts;

hermits of the plague
smoking furtively in alley skirts.

Bodies are traitors, always asking
for one thing but needing another,

wanting another, planning another.
This body wants hands to find it;

yet pricked with poems,
stiletto-sharp, this body

is browned with night, inhabited
by cascades: is aimed at you.
Oct 2023 · 340
I Don't Miss You,
Evan Stephens Oct 2023
I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come

-Sylvia Plath


because you're often here:
my head is booked with you,

heart wrapped in your worm;
even my feet walk where I do not want to go

thanks to old paths you laid to bone,
invisible, revived by instinct.

Don't get big headed about it -
you know my memory, I recall

every figurine caught in the web.
Many have no names now

& some of the rest are only names.
But unlike most, you're wont to escape

this night scribble brain garden,
percolating into a shapely world.

From time to time I wonder where they go,
all those strange and lovely yous

that leak in photo negative
from my mind's eye with dusky limbs

& that unforgettable voice,
paroled and incessant...

If you are ever out strolling
by your canal where the waters are so still

& so black that the drunks swerve away
& the sodium vapor eyes recoil,

& you hear following steps and look back
& there you are...
                               walk faster.
Oct 2023 · 126
Caul
Evan Stephens Oct 2023
Someone I could kiss
Has left his, her
             tracks
             A memory
            Heavy as winter breathing
            in the snow

-Elise Cowen


A white cloud caul brooms back
from the blue jeans baby above,

& a lemon blotch veil settles
over a moss-pocked branch facet.

Slow and chilly the afternoon
peels into memory fingers -

pleasant and strange, like sugar
stuck under the tongue.

I audit odd thoughts:
ephemeral *** reflections

are gauzy in the middle distance,
trapped in a basin of lost things;

grief is colossal, a leviathan
washed in from yesterday

to blight the snubbed beach slant.
In between are a thousand thousand

blacknesses between starry points...
Speckled with desire, I am witness:

the blanching cloud caul is broken
& a day-head blooms from a glass.
Oct 2023 · 241
Autumn Answer
Evan Stephens Oct 2023
Poetry is seeking the answer
Joy is in knowing the answer
Death is knowing the answer

-Gregory Corso


"Fall is here." She yawns
under ruptured sun & brief,
timid cloud; helm of elm leaf
stung to beaten bronze
and sleeves of copper - the bill
of age is paid in change of gold.
The slacking breeze slugs to cold,
slumping toward the thinning rill
whose runny fingers read my palm.
She walks into an afternoon;
I lay in morning's greening dune,
writing a city's sonnet-psalm.
In this bower hours are years,
years are lives, and lives veneers.
Oct 2023 · 144
Black Poppies
Evan Stephens Oct 2023
Drinking blind pilots with my neighbor
until black poppies swim down to meet us.

Dusk-dander lilac's blocked, banished
by jejune faces that caw and crow,

birds bursting with post-paid
parcels of tattered laughter;

we flee to the bottle shop, retrieving
sweet vermouth in the nick of time.

After that, it's poppies, poppies,
poppies all the way down.
Sep 2023 · 156
Letter to H----
Evan Stephens Sep 2023
H----,
You leave for the broad south
in four days, to rasp a new curl

from old timber. Your destiny
is obliged to subdivide again,

fresh and wild. In the basement
of your goodbye I was filled

with a familiar senescence:
old wreaths, nerve-headed,

are hammered to inner doors
where I hide atomic thoughts

and hot-heart steam valves;
muffled click-clacks ricochet

in a containing pink sarcophagus.
How appropriate that I left

in the melting middle of the rain,
the road seething and spitting,

puddled rugs of mercury skating
across Saturday's lap.

H----, this life is strange and brief
& your escape to far sun country

is high adventure; but I lament
your absence, all the same.
Yours, Evan
Sep 2023 · 130
Such Reticence
Evan Stephens Sep 2023
"Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense."

-John Ashbery, Some Trees


After two tiring marriages,
& the women before and between,
she was olly olly oxen free:
come out don't hide it's safe.

Let me backtrack - I was four
& dad left, not too far, but...
far enough. I became, inside,
a two-headed monster of desire:

one me says go find love
grab it hold tight tight tighter;
a second me says wait watch be safe
they're already half out the door.

Feeling free, I gave too much,
or maybe needed same. Or both.
She left, and I was so haunted
I sold my house.

So now I just walk about,
**** an envious ear
at the young and ******
laughing into cut-glass nights.

I scry my sliding self in plate glass
reflections, surrounded by angels
on the hunt, letting the days
engrave their aches all across me.

The two-headed thing I was
is starved lean, fed only on sleep.
What now? This evening
the stars look laminated,

& streetlights hum and mumble
wolfishly over black triangles
of sweetened space where thoughts
hang like last year's ornaments.
Sep 2023 · 104
Mirror Ritual
Evan Stephens Sep 2023
My face, knotted in the shopfront glass,
then smeared smooth, unfolding

in strangest waves and furls
until it's me again, the mask restored.

I do this several times. Step left,
I'm a minotaur, a funhouse scream,

a maze-horror, a twist and blink.
Step right, the pane straightens me

into a mid-life crisis.
But I can't help but wonder

if it's like a coat hanger:
once bent, never really true again;

the mirror regurgitates destinies
as casually as How Do You Do.

I wander down the walk and wonder
if my eye is still slivered and daubed

into a blanched, branched pool
of wild milk spoiling in the open air.
Sep 2023 · 91
Ambition
Evan Stephens Sep 2023
"What's your greatest ambition?"
"To become immortal, and then die."

-Jean-Luc Godard in Truffaut's Breathless


O immortal reader:
join me now (in a pine grove)

where in last night's dream
I attended my own funeral.

Oh no, it's not so morbid
(think of Tom Sawyer).

Besides, at 4:30 (not even dawn),
cats woke me in the half light

before the thing in the grave pit
began stirring and branching

(upwards? downwards?).
Instead I heard the speeches,

(tremulous and sentimental).
I saw the old pictures pinned

to the poster (I looked decent).
No one would talk about how,

how it happened,
but everyone said "I never

thought it would be like this."
(What does that mean?)

And, most mysterious of all,
"At least he achieved his ambition."

When I woke (born to shadow),
I had no idea what that might be,

but pennants of dawn are flying
over a moon drowning in a coffee cup.
Sep 2023 · 165
Birth Chart
Evan Stephens Sep 2023
The bartender says my moon's in Pisces,
Leo ascendent, sun in Aries.

The room loses its light, turns
the blued complexion of an oven

cooling off as the meat rests.
Elbows like tent poles

sunk into pocked bar top.
Thinking about all the Pisces

I have known, so many.
Maybe there's something in this?

Then I think about K----,
who went Chicago to Berlin.

When was her birthday again?
A dalliance in slips and slices,

two marriages on the skids,
hearts pushed through a sieve

across 700 miles. Was she a Pisces?
I remember she didn't want more kids,

& my world hardened.
I guess I'm to blame there.

When she evaporated, post-Berlin,
where did she end up?

Moon in Pisces, moon in Pisces...
lonely in my cylinders of beer,

the memory pares me down
until I'm just nerves fanning out

like the naked head of the tree
brushing up into brown eaves.
Aug 2023 · 118
Beach Party
Evan Stephens Aug 2023
for Lori


Foaming Pacific ovals
sweep cold over nephew's knees -

his laughter breaches sandy mount,
from flashing white crescent

of pepperminted mouth.
Palms above the char pit

chaperone my brother-in-law
as he hisses open enameled cans

of sweet seltzer. My sister
trades antique desert stories

with my aunt. Someone slings
Monopoly hotels back into the box.

August is climbing eastwards,
bringing a fog bank

that won't stop arriving,
arriving, always arriving.
Aug 2023 · 98
Dinner Party
Evan Stephens Aug 2023
[...] a recurring wave
Of arrival. The soul establishes itself.
But how far can it swim out through the eyes.

-John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror


Greasy brown sun smeared over hill,
buttering palm trees, melting in bay.

The Pacific shuffles cold and blue,
Spanish roof is red tooth grin,

irregular and hungry. Day clatter,
hurly burly in the sand pine,

& I'm phasing out, a laugh
lost in sway grass.

Conversations carry late
with new old cousins.

My mind rattles and clots,
needs ballast. Shush. Shush:

fog rises from the sea,
it never stops arriving.
Aug 2023 · 291
Dogs Who Eat Sadness
Evan Stephens Aug 2023
In the legend of the lovers Tristan and Iseult, there is a small, magical, immortal dog named Petitcrieu who "ate half the sadness of everyone he met." He didn't gift any type of forgetfulness, but instead bestowed the ability to bear the sorrow easily.


Bells are ringing wet and pink
on a muscled shoreline of skin,

lining me with their tolling.
Their knell is so heavy in the ear,

it sinks into the sand chokes
trapped on my frozen tongue.

Someone great has vanished again.
The clang and clatter escapes

out of this red chest oven,
bangs around the wild world.

Grief is announced, by way
of cacophony. Where are the dogs?

The ones who eat our sadness
with their bellish barking?

Who look into our brief eyes
& remove the worst of the sting?

Who serve the moon, defy the sun?
They have gone missing.

Sorrow rushes through the waters
a blued frigate with a headwind,

overtaking the heart, the head,
the curried spine...

In this age, sadness is the magazine
that all of us are reading.
Aug 2023 · 100
Letter to K----
Evan Stephens Aug 2023
K----,

You are fresh milk
& I am lemon pulp.

My acid smile pools
on my face, pink curdled shadow

aimed at your corner.
You are so young:

you mock the silver sway
that drips down my cheeks.

You are draped in yourself,
but I don't really mind,

because you're clever. Inside you
I think there's something tender;

but it's not for me to uncover.
I'll sit in the angle,

the beer cranny, and glance
your way with eyes full of sugar.

The night dies waltzing
on yellow lemon heels;

the day is born in a flicker
of snide cream cloud.
Jul 2023 · 193
A Moderate Lamentation
Evan Stephens Jul 2023
Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead, excessive grief the enemy to the living.
-All's Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare

Another well-burnt dusk,
clouds clawing up and out,
denying the gray night-grave.

The evening is so fast:
raw-mooned, silvery-blooded;
our hearts are lesser-than.

Thoughts in a jar, prepared
for the thinnest journey:
O, the memory carousel...

No: Stop the grief, cork it up.
Throw the midnight away.
The gun is empty,

click click click.
The roulette wheel churns
towards the cold morning.

Careful, reader: look how
the black garden blooms -
shhhh - take a sip... forget them.
Jul 2023 · 211
Black Body Radiation
Evan Stephens Jul 2023
It's a fundamental law:
all matter emits radiation
(all of us even you right now)

& the energy level depends
on the temperature of the object
(inversely related to intensity).

This is black body radiation.
Here, in our meager summer rooms,
we have long infrared auras

(only lizards see them);
our atoms are gracefully aching away,
smeary leaking daubs in halo.

The hotter something is
(like that fling of sun up there)
the more energy it heaves away.

That molten starry tussle
is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit
(& so we see it yellow-white) -

"But," you say, "what if something
is hotter than a star, what then?"
Something, you mean,

like the strange chemistry that burns
burns burns burns burns burns
in my brain on a Tuesday night

when remembering an autumn day
in a cemetery in Paris so many years back
(Chopin Morrison Abelard Heloise Wilde Piaf &c)

it was such a perfect day with her
(the synapses and relays are all
clicking clicking clicking clicking

with wild remembrance)...
Well, then (in theory)
I should be giving off ultraviolet light

at an almost infinite rate (wouldn't I?).
I don't know what it means
that I am here in the plush dark

quiet and quelled by thought
(except perhaps the catastrophic energy
is scrawling and etching me into oblivion).
Jul 2023 · 128
Pareidolia
Evan Stephens Jul 2023
My skin, thin as foam
on the beer body...

Then it evaporates,
& something leaks out

from the valleys inside
into the ornate air:

some of them can feel it,
& watch me closely.

The bathroom graffiti
sings my name in choir.
Jul 2023 · 140
The Ice House
Evan Stephens Jul 2023
Ghosts splash about
on the ice house wall,
beer chitters in the jar,
stories are told in fits and gnarls.

The moon is a bleached breast
in its brassiere of dappled smoke,
up above the cracked wet wire
in the driftwood garden curl.

In a slant, we all watch
a woman across the alley
in her blue dress, scanning
her hands for news of the heart.

In the near square, a thin man
is also a plume, standing shirtless
on his crystal wash of balcony.
The street sings: sea static.

All these people walk blithely by
as rain and steam take turns
on the roulette wheel.
I feel the weight of my interior,

I feel the limit of skin, the world
that ends there. I'm not sure
I belong here at the gathered table:
I'm a reflected photo negative.

Leaves spiral overhead
as the green-bedded steps
rise up in blotches to meet me.  
Loaves of clouds hunt and burst.

Whatever is behind me
presses me forward;
but whatever is ahead
pushes me back.
Jun 2023 · 123
Advice from Exile
Evan Stephens Jun 2023
This dim rain stall,
cleated to a Friday,
stuck at half mast,
gray as an ash smear,
as an illness:

it's the hour to slip away,
sling down the wet road
to find newer bones,
fresher thoughts,
beyond this empty dooryard.

No more sullen hearth
gapped with chill:
step through the ring-necked
steam by the high cloud wall,
with a proper heart

that's open for business.
Pry loose the evening
like a wisdom tooth
from the silver city jaw.
A foxed blur hangs

in the spangled hedge:
It's a yesterday.
Turn your back to it.
Say yes to their hands,
say yes to their eyes.
Jun 2023 · 148
Sunday Confession
Evan Stephens Jun 2023
The bar is made of rutted plank,
made smooth by skittering
hands of glass. The air?

The air is a pool of static.
Try to forget it. Let chemicals
gently exit the blood.

Talk to sweet Zoë at the bar,
she is a bright bucket smile,
a hot and lovely laugh.

Surfer green crumbles
tumble from the brunch
branch by my neighbor.

I confess: I want love.
I'm hunting it in the streets,
I'm sailing at dawn for it.

It evaporates. I cut my mouth.
Blood swings away, vitrifies.
I am nobody. I am nobody.

The city is brass and ivory
& brick ramparts rising.
I confess: I need you. Need you.
Jun 2023 · 210
Limit
Evan Stephens Jun 2023
A bruisy trumpet of cloud spills
upward from tower-top neck,

faceless grey guyser
pluming from brick bottle.

No wishes are granted today:
instead, the sponge-honey skulls

of dithering sidewalk elms
dream their green dreams over us

as the sun falters for a moment,
scattered through the lawn.

Come slip like shade
into my outstretched hand,

walk with me in an afternoon
somewhere between rain and fever.
May 2023 · 122
Floating in the Bone
Evan Stephens May 2023
My hands are crooning,
those old songs of blood, love, and night.

I wrestle the angel on the riverside,
damp wings scraping my face

as I eat the halo whole.
Now I'm adrift, floating in the bone -

airplanes are bleeding white ether
in a lipstick sky, under a crumpled sun.

At midnight I watch the redhead
send glassy broadcasts to her stone flock:

she shoots mr sleek-hair in the attic
of the blue-house on the electric island.

These impressions storm through me...
nothing is narrative, nothing is coherent.

I was wrestling an angel in one moment,
the next my hands were crooning

sandy nocturnes of blood and night.
I lost my job and now I'm flying away.
May 2023 · 202
Bottled Gods
Evan Stephens May 2023
In for a penny, in for a pound,
just throw the cork away:

the glass is filled until we're drowned.
With murmur and rumor we pray,

dreams mantling like thorn-crowns.
How much could two souls weigh...?

More than a feather. Well, together we're bound,
& together we'll stay.

Who'll buy the next round?
Pint-hands are cold and mottled as clay,

their faces spinning lost and found:
can't win if we don't play.

When the hour comes round,
there's a bill to be paid

before sleep seeps from the ground
like steam... No, lover, this way -

come sever the spine of the town
with me, two fraying strays

riding each other all the way down,
eyes flat and cold as old ashtrays.
May 2023 · 121
Letter to Z----
Evan Stephens May 2023
Dear Z----,

Once, maybe, I was an Orpheus -

one of millions (there are still millions),
calling someone back from an underworld -

once, maybe, I had candles for fingers,
stars leaking from my teeth,
eyes that broke barred doors in twain.

But not now. You were so shy
at the bar's short shoal
giving me rain-in-Montreal smiles,
hinting at a history of disappointment.

Sometimes, it all changes in a single night -
but the magic failed us both.
I will always wonder.

So I am sorry: my hands, my eyes...
my starry mouth a wide sorry-slash.

I have to go. -E
May 2023 · 124
An Open Invitation
Evan Stephens May 2023
"I am, in my condition, a prince"
-The Tempest, Act III, scene i

Hushed, hunched night -
with wet beaks of yellow,
cars cut cancerous flowers
into glass-skinned stores -

pornographic eyes spill and wave
from rolled faces rioting free
of the short-hour restaurants,
into leaves green as billiard felt.

The self-poisoners are out tonight,
their shouts like jaundiced fireworks.
A moon-breast hangs heavily
in a night thin as gauze.

Up on my mazurka hill,
far above the blistered river,
I consider my options.
I'm deep in the dying, but -

despite my condition -
a prince of bottle and verse.
Black gears, tongue-and-groove,
force the night forward.

Reader - I'm alone tonight -
consider this an open invitation.
The secret knock is this:
Three, then one, then two -

by this will I know it's you,
come to talk poetry long
into the whaling hours,
debating the merits of it all.

Bring nothing but your thoughts,
I have wine enough for us all,
& if the wine fails, I have scotch.
The words will carry us to morning.
Apr 2023 · 169
To M----
Evan Stephens Apr 2023
Those first Thursdays you were ringless -
we were cloud-shares with starry bearings,
lakes of mercury eeling under our skins,
small moon-screens in our palms.

And then, on that nervy warm nightwalk
when I was about to ask you to coffee,
you pricked the air and felt me leaning:
Ah... you're married, ten years now.

Flirtations wilt into aches.
Yet even now, as you wing away,
a streetlight's encore sprays pinked spangles,
& storybook trees are shushly budding.

The rain comes and goes.
Ribs and thews pull into a heart,
even as the evening pulls apart
with a bird's telephone step.
Apr 2023 · 520
With or Without
Evan Stephens Apr 2023
Sitting with you in the kitchen
Talking of anything
Drinking tea
I love you

Oh I wish you body here
With or without the bearded poem

-Elise Nada Cowen, "Sitting"


Face the firing squad, Evan -
the dowsing rod pierced memorial waters
coiling in the soft morning triangles.

Morning coffee builds browning steam
as I recall the feeling of lips, hungry lips -
ladies of death and water.

The mind is the borderland.
Where does mind go after the body
returns to the ash salt cycle?

Oh, hell - who cares anyway?
Billions of years from now, the sun eats us,
the sun dies and in dying

it eats its children, like the titans did.
There won't be new stars.
Whatever lump of death I become,

will be scattered into the universal zero
way, way before that. But ... my mind?
Does it just shut down, a key turn,

going cold? A message, read once?
A name known to a few, then unknown to all.
I no longer even desire one person like I did -

I just want to connect a few times
before the lazy azure turns black.
Some company in the evenings.  

I know you understand - remember
when someone slowly touched
the inside of your wrist?

"Let me out now please –
Please let me in"
Mar 2023 · 327
Black Park of Bed
Evan Stephens Mar 2023
Alone
In black park of bed

-Elise Nada Cowen


Bedding them, saving them -
(or maybe the reverse?)
it was all the same to me.

All of them, like that;
One liked to wrestle first,
another wanted to be tied down.

Their eyes loosed in the darkness,
swimming at me, sparking
& begging, always begging.

But all of our skins need touching,
all of our faces want remembering.
So I gave them what they needed:

I loved them all with unclouded heart.
Ivy trellises inside me,
but memory is still sterling.

Black park of bed -
yellow crush dawn -
I am the giving snare.
Feb 2023 · 173
They Strip the Street
Evan Stephens Feb 2023
The neon vests are huddled
against the white sleek of the van,
crowing cigarette gossips
as they warm up the machine.

The asphalt is plowed away,
churned and melted, black butter
of the earth, pecked to hell
by rapid, merciless steel beaks.

The foreman's memento mori:
tobacco's body returns itself to ash,
a smoked soul rises toward my window,
gray crown cooling and fading.

They strip the street.
Denuded, a dirt stripe stretches
into a water cradle.
They pour tar into a slick shape,

it gleams thousandfold,
accusing insect oil eyes.
Paths can be taken away, remade:
crooked roads straightened.

Two years of grief distilled
in gulped gallons: undone,
undrunk, sweated out
on the cork yoga mat.

New things are placed
beneath the surface,
filling the cavities.
New skin is pressed.

The orange vests disperse
into the rings of evening.
I sit and wait in the new dark:
someone is coming for me, and soon.
Feb 2023 · 354
Night-Blooming Cereus
Evan Stephens Feb 2023
Flowers that blossom at night:
those who open in the dark,
those who open to the dark.

I sit in my ***-bottomed boat,
thinking about the turns
& branches of my life.

No: my boat is dry-docked.
Let's be honest:
it's just a lonely bed, no oars.

But I am open, at last:
I am ready for someone
to come and turn their key

in this reddened lock.
Behind this door are rewards.
Behind this door I am waiting.

But let's be still more honest:
no one is racing down the hall
with a key in hand to try their luck.

I am a night-blooming cereus:
open in the dark, scented,
waiting for something in the black

to land and spread pollen.
I will breathe it - I will inhale
the sweetness, the gesture...
Jan 2023 · 259
Crimes of the Heart
Evan Stephens Jan 2023
The statues are eyeless in Iveagh,
ruins under leafed eaves,

effaced, pitted, blotted,
benighted green and wet:

they have heard far more love
than mine and hers, witnessed

others filled with beer, wine,
& whiskey. Forbidden fruit

rots on the branch. Magpies gather
by blue knees, curious and hopeful.

Crimes of the heart were committed
on that night. The sound of the river

sinewed through the cracked window.
The past was father of the present,

the sheets were stained sails.
Coffee was brewing in the evening,

corks rolled into corners,
whiskey emptied the memory.

Now it's years, years later:
I just walked on water,

the river would not collapse beneath me.
A friend sent me neon letters,

rain is due tomorrow,
and the kittens are restless.

I open a bottle. My lovely neighbor
is building a mirror before dinner,

she borrows a screwdriver.
I am guilty of everything you said.

I am guilty: but there is no jury
who would ever convict.
Jan 2023 · 317
Murmuration: New Year's
Evan Stephens Jan 2023
New Year's Eve dark at 4:30,
a dilation like a pleasured eye:
stray clouds pull themselves
across the clarity

& stars smudge unreasonably
across taffy-thin years of light,
long inviting blears.
I am peeling away from myself,

half-drunk on the absence of grief,
half-drunk on my lovely neighbor's wine:
it's funny how little moments
can pull together the murmuration

into a pattern you can hold:
I feel possibilities, sour morsels
of old dreams going loose
into the frozen nacre of street,

into the cubic alleyways,
rain smiles light as *****.
But moments don't hold,
something turns off -

the clouds are burning alive
in a songbird's oubliette.
The bastille falls
all the prisoners escape.
Dec 2022 · 194
Kelly
Evan Stephens Dec 2022
We were just telephones
full of young ***,
sharp breath and sticky,
talking into sleep...

I'd dial into your machine,
it was your mom singing
"Splish Splash" by Bobby Darin,
you were so embarrassed

(with that button nose
you hated so much),
but it was always OK, Kelly.
We met just the once, at Alan's party,

for his basement Exorcist
& you clutched my hand in the dark.
When you're 15, that kind of thing
takes on certain meanings.

When you broke us up
I sobbed in my bedroom,
pleading to Richard Pryor
who I had pasted to the ceiling.

I lost track of you
until you married my blond
summer steakhouse boss:
everyone said you weren't happy.

Now you are a minus sign,
a gauze-ghost, an atom-gap,
a redheaded dull-bladed heartache
who I thought I loved, once

(in my teenage way, I did).
I buttoned my shirt wrong
while remembering you,
I tasted you in a glass of rye.

There is a freeze coming.
Wear a scarf, a good jacket:
the rain is coffin lacquer gloss
as it shines and skitters into ice.
Dec 2022 · 152
Danielle
Evan Stephens Dec 2022
In 1992 a major storm tore
the rented beach finger,

ten foot whitecaps yawning
in a horizon of clenched tar.

I walked with mom
through clews of wind

& saw conches strewn
on down the dying strand:

bleached comma fragments
among the bolting towel skins.

The sea was standing there
on foaming legs, fully awake now,

green glass tongues hissing,
a death myth of muscle,

smiles and grimaces
& lolls and swallows,

all at once, synchronous.
More alive than any god.
Dec 2022 · 292
At the Night Market
Evan Stephens Dec 2022
The olive dusk tents overheard,
pleated, wavering, starless,

ghostly, embossed with moon,
scratched with street light.

Cars hunt across a new ice blanket,
casting tambourine shakes

onto the pavement as they brake
in cherry arrays. Tonight I watch

my neighbors in their curious coves,
each jaundiced room a flat Argus eye,

as they bed down, break off
the lamp network, pull blinds down

over myriad invisible couplings.
I have hesitations in the dark.

I see the neon-breasted giants
towering towards midnight

in this aching pavilion.
Like prisoners we send messages

with our mirrors.
At the Christmas market,

an etched man sells fake Egyptian
canoptic jars. "Viscera," he says,

"it holds your heart after you die."
The jar looks like it was carved

last week by a bored child.
Even if our hearts shrunk

to apricot pits, abandoned,
betrayed, disappointed, this jar

couldn't hold even one.
Still, I consider it for a moment.

But the olive tent is waving to me:
no sale, no sale, no sale.
Dec 2022 · 153
Mark Harmon as Ted Bundy
Evan Stephens Dec 2022
There's a quaver in the skin
by the blue eye plaza:
Bundy's glittering lips
spread and spread and spread.

We all love a pretty mouth
filled with charismatic teeth
that assure you: all is well.
All is well. Come: get in the car...

No, no, it's alright - it's an actor,
it's a screen, a script -
glass and paper.  
It's not Bundy, it's just Mark:

Mark the UCLA quarterback,
drinks his beer and takes his shoes off
like anyone. But you have to wonder
how sticky the mask becomes.
I hate you, 502 Bad Gateway
Dec 2022 · 141
Letter to Myself
Evan Stephens Dec 2022
"Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible--
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so I wait--bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life."

-Gregory Corso, "Marriage"


To Whom It May Concern:

Three years ago I was supposed to marry
for a third time, but disease came
& courts closed and the house of cards
began shaking: aces are thin.

Two years ago it ended savagely
as I was packing my things for Dublin,
looking up how to get the cat on the plane,
when she texted: scalpels are thin, too.

I began drinking. Not like the books say -
the lonely poet sipping sherry in a turret,
in a black cape with a quill in hand -
no, ugly cups of scotch at eight in the morning.

The whisky brought my grandfather's body
from the past and forced it onto me -
I stopped recognizing myself
in the poisoned mirror. I sold the house.

I bought a new place, in an artist's neighborhood,
I went for long walks, I purged some bad blood.
But the heart ran down like a forgotten watch.
I felt tarnished. I felt like I died years ago.

Now whenever a poem slips out of me,
I am dismayed. The world around me
reflects endlessly a cascading loneliness,
a disappointment, an uncertainty,

& it's all I can talk about because looking in,
breaking the lacre, is unbearable most of the time.
Clouds sing and perish in the new night;
when day comes, it's sodden, sealed, sunless.

I don't know where else to go with this letter,
so I will scrawl my fingers across the clatter
& go lay down. The street is spotted:
It's starting to rain.

v/r, E-
surprise, not a lyrical poem for once. just decided to write without thinking.
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