Alligator poem #12/The First Alligator (and it was good)

the face of this alligator
along black waters
in the mist of the earth
in the crouch of all creeping things
in the dream of the first man
in the flesh of his flesh
in the blood of his blood
in the sigh of his sigh
along the neck of his wife.

Alligator Poem #11/ Three Stanzas

I.
we wrote your eyes
against the sky
plucked them and cast them
slurred and streaked
what dim jewels dead in the mud

II.
we wrote your leather
into islands,
wild with gulls,
dense and drifting
the skin of the seas

III.
we wrote your brain
into our scripture
this crimson become cadences
we sighed over our sons
become older than we.

Guest Alligator Poem #1 by Kenny Mooney

Our first "guest written" alligator poem comes from Kenny Mooney. My thanks to Kenny for sending this one along--it's terrific, right?


They stalk these corridors, damp hisses through dry dust, tails dragging over floorboards stained with black-red. They throw shadows against flat yellowing walls in these abandoned apartments, reflections in windows ghosting their bodies, jump cutting through pools of amber light. Their bodies crawl and slide over one another; heads turning against one another; jaws opening, showing teeth to one another. They fight and kill and devour one another. In these dry dust halls, under sick-orange lamplight. They gather around her bed, their scraping claws, hissing breath and grinning teeth, a song sung in the umbra, a hot hymn on the rotten stench of their writhing bodies. They arch their backs, open maws raised to the tangle of bedding and limbs. She hears them sing, her hospital white skin awakening, blood bleeding through cotton in cold water. Her eyes open as their song builds. Neon flickers against windows frames; electricity moves through polyester uniforms. She sits upright, her eyes collapsing gravity wells pulling the light into her. Her hands stretch out to them. Her hands stretch out to caress them. In these dry dust halls, their lowing moves through stone and bone.

Alligator Poem #10

If you sang songs into this alligator

if you hoisted open its jaws

and called into the cavern

if you sat within the sweltering

and caroled

holding hands with your mother

and father

your voice would collect in the weeds

and echo back in the noise

of static and screams

in the hoarse moans of your mother

in the night

and the strangled gasping of a man

whose name you remember

only because it is your own.

Alligator Poem #9/

There are birds hunched inside

This animal’s mouth

Living on small cities of meat and bone.

There are rivers longer than the rivers

You have ever known

Black waters

And ancient coiling tides

Pocketed by

The carcasses of water bison

And the silent drift

Of men in their canoes

Their low sunken eyes

The tilt of their rifles.

alligator poem #8/ Untitled

on television they are killing alligators by the boat full. on television a live and thrashing alligator becomes an alligator weightless and outstretched with the report of one rifle and men in sweaty ball caps and men in flannel smile on camera and their teeth are brown flecks of tobacco and their teeth are missing. on television men in blue jeans and steel toed boots, men in leather gloves, men in rubber hip waders are teaching young people how to train rifles onto the backs of the skulls of alligators how to grab hold of the corpse of alligators how to haul these into boats with nets, with bare hands. on television men in rubber aprons teach children how to sell these by the flatbed truck full to leather merchants in the pond stink of their warehouses. on television children play house in the carcasses of alligators they build houses in the legs and toy soldiers from the tongues on television children live in the cities of flies erected on the skulls and stomachs of alligators they utter commandments onto their humming and squirming. they smear them to wings and wings to the dust.

Alligator Poem #7/ Those Rough Dead Winds

You there child

In the hum of your

Mother’s moans

The brass thistle

Of your father’s belt

Those rough exhalations

Yellow eyes

Immutable and peering

Through tall dead grasses--

What have you said

into these rough dead winds?

Alligator Poem #6/ Into Valleys Unknown

Today a breathe of light

A blossom of sound

Today the wink and all expanded

Into shapes and cadences and

Waves of measureless static

Oceans of hissing

And villages of leather

Today the first noise shouted

Into caverns

Today the first alligator we slew

and cobbled into islands

Into asylums

mausoleums

Today the first breath and the last breath

Today these clouds we clotted into smog

Today the eyes of the alligator

A newborn north star trembling

Winking

Radiating

gesturing

into valleys unknown.

Alligator Poem #5/ A New Beast Arisen

There were mothers she knew, his mother and her mother,

& all felt the rough hump & how it grew

They cooed & they brought her tiny footed pajamas &

they helped him hang mobiles of pink ponies and poodle dogs

over the bassinet.

He thought how they could do no other,

although they must have heard the hissing inside,

an echoing whine, a trapped steam

from his wife’s mound.

& they surely smelled the peat moss

like a soil turned sour & dead.

Certainly he smelled it upon her side of the bed,

her clothes in the hamper.

When they touched her mounding hump

she said “did you feel it kick”

& by kick he understood she meant “thrash.”

& when she stood nude in the bathroom light

& complained of her breasts large & sore he knew she meant

“All of this, gone to waste,”

for an alligator drinks only the fluids of the membrane it

is born into.

& in the glow of the yellow light he knew the

shadow of an alligator floating

& at the doctor’s he watched it swim & drift

in waves of white static.

& there were night he slept

lost in fever dreams, or slept not at all,

knowing an alligator kills the membrane it is

born into.

& when she felt pain he knew it was struggling free

& his heart tightened

& soon he knew the green-black fluid it had made within her

spilled into the carpets & the gathering of

mosquitoes & soon the humidity.

While her screams & her pallor & the tendons in her neck

he clasped her hand & said, “Breathe!”

& by this he meant “do not die” & he said

“You’re doing excellent” & “I love you”

& by this he meant

“I don’t know what we will be

when this is over.”

& now she before him in tears & screaming

& now before him dripped in crimson & wailing

some new creature

arisen.