new from above/ground press: Pyramid Song, by Jamie Townsend

Pyramid Song
Jamie Townsend
$5

    as knowledge builds
    up with physical
    experience to touch
    the earth is a version
    of time impressed
    on us a totem
    stuffed inside his jock
    Nature is operating
    in ways that, at least
    to our conception,
    are unchanged
    naïve dreams
    we switch bodies
    & I lose my self
    consciousness I
    fall in love with
    the young
    dead shape
    shifters
    who provide
    possibility for
    a future I
    couldn’t possibly
    imagine
    each form
    now bound together in
    the brilliant seclusion of
    a stellar nursery
    another life when
    I fall asleep
    inside the belly of
    a fiberglass creature
    on the outskirts
    of Knokke &
    feel beams lift
    from my chest
    glowing radiant
    as a drag
    on American Spirit
    or inversion of
    Patrick Bateman’s
    psychotic avatar
    split apart by the terror
    of boredom a new pattern
    washed in the refrain
    HOW DEEP
    IS YOUR LOVE
    this well of bonhomie
    to sustain the dream
    & shore up
    barricades against
    doubt & this morning
    on the train
    the apparition of a thin
    furred hand latched
    to the grab bar
    appears assailed
    by the workaday
    my blush ripens
    into fever wherein
    a magic or
    as Genet says deliberate
    predisposition
    might register – I could not
    take lightly the idea
    that people made love
    without me
    I plant a kiss
    there as reminder
    living just enough
    for the city
    though most often
    I doubt
    my real feelings

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
November 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cover/Design by Nicholas DeBoer

Jamie Townsend is a poet, publisher, and editor living in Oakland, California. They are half-responsible for Elderly, a publishing experiment and persistent hub of ebullience and disgust. They are the author of several chapbooks from Portable Press@YoYo Labs, Little Red Leaves Textile Editions, and Ixnay Press, among others. Their first the full-length collection, Shade (Elis Press), was released in 2015. An essay on the history of the New Narrative magazine Soup was published in The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books, 2017). They are currently editing a forthcoming volume of Steve Abbott's writings (Nightboat, 2019).

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