Douglas Luman poems

Rehab Rosetta Stone

 

Re-

 

(prefix)

i call myself a name in the mirror

again

again

word on loan

radiant ray’s repo man

keeps bringing me back here

to the bathroom sink

washing my mouth out

to sing a diatonic drop

of golden sun

never reaching mi,

a name i call myself in the mirror

again

again 

 

 

 

Build

   

(verb)

when we walked before day-break

men in the garden grew a skeleton

that looked like a hut,

 

brick-layer skin made

from adobe mud cast from ground’s dust

baked by builder-chefs, culinary sun.

 

we were enslaved to construct

pyramids over lunch

out of grains and fruit.

   

men cooking the hut

ate, too (as proof, i once watched

one eat a whole lemon bar)

 

went home after heat-waves

preheated afternoons.

we went to rooms like refrigerators.

 

i wondered why they went home

when they were done building

never considering

 

that i lacked the strength

to build a hut,

or eat a whole lemon bar.

 

 

 

Make

 

– after Edward Elric

 

(verb)

gods buy humans

at the grocery store:

one kilogram phosphorous

two kilograms lime

three grams silicon

five grams iron

four liters ammonia

eight grams fluorine

twenty kilograms carbon

trace amount bromine

thirty-five liters water

one quarter kilogram salt,

eighty grams sulfur

pinch of cobalt

roll into a ball.

make oceans boil.

cook for one hundred years,

bury in the soil

 

 

 

Rebuild/Remake

 

(transitive verb)

i have learned these verbs

still i only see bones

in the sentences

   

when these doctors speak

words like scriptures

they think themselves gods

 

when they whisper

I will remake you

you will rebuild you.

 

 

 

 

Douglas Luman’s work has found forthcoming publication through other journal outlets as well, including (forthcoming) the Toad Suck Review, uCity Review and Epigraph Magazine.