Nappanee

Paul Cunningham

Me, new with the city cramps and he was all backwoods
with false eyelashes took me to Nappanee
fed me apples as his green eyes candled snazzy
we telephone-wired long across country longly
knocking round orchard houses, knocking round
him with a hay-vein shining bove forehead
he was my Swayfox, he was my Junkbabe
on a furious trunk bottom where the apples mess
where the napples just hill handpainted spotty
we napped from time to time slurping radio
off a highway tingle, two jabberdogs ripdrifting
sleepwalking cross a screwgrass million
came across a moss-eaten cop car corrupted all swamp
all undulating green vines green as bile
up with the worms the rain hoes us up warm
where he holds me, narrating the field with our sleep
and babble and presses me down gently until I’m
pressing dandelions with my frame
something plucks my wings wakes me up so
animal in the way it, in the way it queers up moon
as I love him beatingly with my elkhart
with my nighttime gut of a brain

Paul Cunningham (b. 1989) is the author of a chapbook of poems called GOAL/TENDER MEAT/TENDER (horse less press, 2015) and he is the translator of two chapbooks by Swedish author, playwright, and video artist, Sara Tuss Efrik: Automanias: Selected Poems (winner of the 2015 Goodmorning Menagerie Chapbook-in-Translation Contest) and The Night’s Belly (Toad Press, Fall 2016). He is a contributing editor to Fanzine and his writing can be found in Dostoyevsky Wannabe’s Cassette 68, Gigantic Sequins, Fireflies, Bat City Review, LIT, Spork, DIAGRAM, and others. His poem-films have appeared in Public Pool, MAKE Magazine Lit & Luz Festival, Seattle’s INCA: The Institute for New Connotative Action, the Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City, and Kastratet. He holds a M.F.A. from the University of Notre Dame.