Chapbooks By Joshua Michael Stewart

Sink Your Teeth Into The Light
ISBN-10-1599249782 ISBN-13-978-1599249780
Finishing Line Press, 2012 $14.00
FOR AN ADDITIONAL THREE MINUTES, PLEASE INSERT TWENTY-FIVE CENTS
Suppose God doesn't own your soul,
but rents from the Devil? Snow clouds gather
in the sky like dust balls under an old couch.
Storefront windows are covered in yellowing
newspapers. Boys in dirty jackets collect
shards of glass to pack into snowballs.
A woman with pine needle hair shouts
into a payphone that had its cord cut.
We believe what we can bear: an old man
brings his dead wife's dress to his face
even though it’s scented with another man.
A teenage girl tugs a sweater over her head
and disappears. And your shadow on the wall
gesticulates like a king addressing his peasantry.

Vintage Gray
ISBN-1-58998-491-9
Pudding House Publications, 2007 $5.00
IGNES FATUI
Latin for something deluding or misleading. Lit. Trans: “foolish fires.”
What you’ve mistaken for a monocle
is the dewdrop dangling from my eyelash.
And for the semaphores you saw zigzagging
across the field last Thursday evening: the pell-mell
of newly winged angels. I play My Guitar
Wants to Kill Your Mama, on my pyrite-plated
kazoo, interchanging guitar with kazoo of course.
Are you dazzled by my caterpillar-skinned leotard?
Does my ability to dance the Charleston leave you
breathless? I am the wisteria under your window,
which you take as a slow fire season by season
engulfing your house in purplish and white flames.