Ethan Paquin

[polycount forum]

Bags Don’t Come Free

Saturday morning
I plan to ride my bike to Target
to buy front-closing bras

for post-surgical Esther 

but the fog is down —
the temperature's barely 50.

Instead, I bike to her house
where no one’s up. I unlatch
the chicken house ramp —
Say hello, chicks, to the new day —
park in the basement
& snag the key to the little car.

I drive the route I’d meant to bike
along river, ocean, harbor
via East Cliff, Murray, 7th, Brommer, 41st.

Target's not even open

then they are, but they don’t
stock front-closing bras.

I walk through the dark mall & outside
& into Kohl's to find bras.
No one’s here. Thousands of bras.
I haven’t bought a bra
in 45 years — a nursing bra
I tried once & tossed.

No clerks in sight so I scan

rack after rack — 1500 styles of bra. 

Only three close in the front

in 38B, so I buy them
from a checker who asks me
do you need a bag? No

though I think about how
I will look walking outside

then in, through the empty mall
back to Target & out to my car
holding a beige, a black
& a salmon pink bra.

The checker calls me back
& hands me a black cloth bag
marked Kohl’s — I thought
she says, we’d given
these all away. She doesn't know
I pass no one

while walking my Kohl's bag
back to Target to shop 

for placemats, napkins, & a spatula.

Do you need a bag? No 

thank you. Let my housewares

share space with Esther's bras.

Ethan Paquin [The PIP Blog]

from Ethan Paquin's Cloud vs. Cloud, Ahsahta, 2013:

Kinoglaz

No matter the latitude, dearest sky,

something ill-mannered’s about you —

It might hold a staff and pace atop you

It might be rain, supreme toy and gray

It might like a tough wife be gravity’s

balling you up It might be. Just might

But down here, the bottom, I’ll get to it,

I’ll get to the bottom of you and report

back. I had no dinner tonight an attempt

at clear thought monosyllabic in ease.

I can see through you whom I know

and have never met via balloon force

but I’m coming and I’m ruminating.

Cacti in a desert aahing matins upward

Birds zesting aloft from eaves and trees

We’re all coming to find you god all of us

all of it. Storm the gate with matchsticks

we will. It will be violent when we find you.

Ars Nihil

I think we write poetry to see what a dun flower might smell like,

what a razor meticulous in its upkeep spurs in the barnyard festivus,

to see what frost feels like expanding scrotum of morning, hillocks all

smooth with cow and or goat, I think this is a wonderful life we’ve got

because we can ejaculate and erase. I think we write poetry up all night

paperweighted as we are to lilac awards, I think there is a man wandering

up a driveway in my poem to be wandering up a driveway in my poem to be

and I know where to start, with the man sawing wood and then leaving

to a hole at or of which he can’t even perceive. He just exits his workshop

and begins walking to reach my driveway’s base, then up the angle toward

me and my home white nicety yellow clapboard New England noon-timeish

famous and well-practised. I think we write poetry cuz it comes like yknow

Halloween. I think that guy is still walking I think I will SHOCK THE FUCK

OUT OF YOU WITH NEEDLESS CAPS. I think we write poetry all bummed

because an iceberg is on the way and there’s an orgy on the communication bridge

and we weren’t invited. The dun flower I think it stinks I think it just might stink.