Chapbooks By Joshua Michael Stewart

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Sink Your Teeth Into The Light

ISBN-10-1599249782       ISBN-13-978-1599249780

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Finishing Line Press, 2012                        $14.00

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FOR AN ADDITIONAL THREE MINUTES, PLEASE INSERT TWENTY-FIVE CENTS

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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.

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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.

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Vintage Gray

ISBN-1-58998-491-9

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Pudding House Publications, 2007             $5.00

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IGNES FATUI

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Latin for something deluding or misleading. Lit. Trans: “foolish fires.”

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What you’ve mistaken for a monocle
is the dewdrop dangling from my eyelash.
And for the semaphores you saw zigzagging

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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

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kazoo, interchanging guitar with kazoo of course.
Are you dazzled by my caterpillar-skinned leotard?
Does my ability to dance the Charleston leave you

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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.

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