Three poems by Nate Maxson

The New Year

The cinema show behind us rages like a storm to static
Silhouettes for the voyeurs, flashing documentation of bruises shaped like butterflies
Sown to shadow and the ticking of waterwheel sized projector machines
What water rattles down on empty red velvet seats and would anyone drink it if they had to?
We’ll find out
Open to the sky
The ashes of the new world falling upon our shoulders
In the rolling blackout of your touch I am a creature of raw defiance in theory only
So bare
Like the freshest
Glowing
Snow

The Bargaining Stage

At night you can hear them hitting the wall, like large raindrops:
Thud, thud, thud: these fractal pattern of tachycardia
The things we hedge our bets on, insurance policies if you will

All those baseball cards from the 1990s
That were given to me like stocks, as gifts on the holidays
I still remember the names of all the forgotten pitchers whose portraits I happened to own

Or perhaps
A man singing a lullaby to himself in the bathroom of a bus station
Is that better?
More illustrative?
I think it is

Because I’ve seen these days fade into blank space, an empty boat drifting from saltwater to sand and so on and so on: the theme repeats like oars striking the reservoir’s metal bottom

And in another, more cultured variation:
Van Gogh’s wheat fields
Rustling
As we disappear

Mask/ Admission

All these accoutrements that I’ve modified like a classically mad scientist fashionista into myself?
This arctic halo crack and knotting in a ring around my head
All of it, the process of rebuilding
The live current twitching in the space between your eyelashes, little flakes of static
Your words inking your immediate air like the most delicate of pollutants
Let us remove all these fictionalities
Like silk dropping to the stone floor of a temple in a fantasy
All the reprocessings that are expected of us
Masked and suave, no: let us burn down until the green wood smokes through

Despite all my predilections towards infamy
I was born with my invisible heart
On the outside
It’s a silly thing
The way it sings and sings
You can put your hand on it
And watch me reappear
Like ice crystals on the spine of a book
In a house abandoned somewhere on the prairie

You can run a wire through me,
Point it shaking to the sky
And watch the northern lights
Like a spell
At noon