jeffrey bean

Weird Meat

Foul smells started tailing me: bandages,

tub fungus, singed wig. My clothes

went stiff, creaked like wicker.

I ran after busses. Got fired.

The committee cited

my artificial beard. Burnt orange juice,

sweaty prosthesis. I took

a dance class. They taught me to write

apologies in floor dust with my loafers.

I sought the old good smells

to no avail: cake shops closed in my face.

In the park some joker scrawled

names on each tulip in piss.

One day the smells transformed

into women I had known. Turkey shit:

grandma Meg. Wet pants

of the homeless: Mary, my babysitter,

wanting to know why I still slouched.

Dead snake in a barn: my first love,

Charlotte, slugging me in the chest, saying

fucked up good, didn't you. She didn't stop

there. Turned into a sled

on a snowless field in my hometown.

I sat on it (her?) to watch the elbows of hills

I had loved. Their hands underground grasped--

after what? What did I leave down there?

Story

Snow on earth-old

hinges slouched down

brung its hundred

deaf thumbs brung

a burnt blueness And its one

dull pronouncement

spread its mute shelves wilted the roofs

with its night-in-noon

And quiet bells all day down

Beak Street till it wilted

poor you

your lightbulb your stale soup

And brung down through

its ceaseless dumb typing ACTUAL NIGHT

And there performed night-slow

flutterdowns to the mouths of plows

which mau-maued it

into flutterless hunching heaps

And so you woke to your town overtaken

by huge bloomed dunes of blue

The Light You Left to Look For

Mail trucks shave days

up and down

till each day is bare. Hanging

in trees: skinny light,

the light you left to look for.

You're late

for places you won't find.

It's as though you left

for work, snapping your fingers,

then backtracked

for your snaps. The mouths

of parking meters say

your body's bald as minutes.

You search your pockets for change.

A recent graduate of the University of Alabama's MFA program, Jeffrey

Bean is the 2006-2008 Axton Fellow in Poetry at the University of

Louisville. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Quarterly West,

Southern Poetry Review, Willow Springs, The Laurel Review, The

Eleventh Muse, Sycamore Review, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. He