Maxwell Rabb

Soft heat flattens our field

viscous before daily chores
fogged rural mimicry
inside wooden fences

New routines by the whirl wheel.

Danced hardwood
covered in old shattered mirror

beneath the porchlight
myosistic metal awnings
and bronze roots squashed under my palms.

Look above!

An eye fractured by fabric strands

a scythe
cut
of evening primroses
propped by

a sponged planet
viscous gnats
barren termites

                        All rebounded as tensile limbs
                        in swinging indium blades

                        steers eyes                             shoulders to the sun

Nascent voices burst as desert spoons fold in–

and the malleable sun is stored by steeples
and the malleable sun is burning the soil– 

the daylight                 gash
lured    by steel tidewaters

stumbling    blue weather
patterned            songs of

baritones   and eventides
where my throat muscle


pastes opaque letters to

punctured silences from
white bellbirds where

     my voice is tuned by
                    an iron alloy

this August i spend on
waxed water

burning soot and prying
            open ribbons like

taut coils         called by a
       sequenced crash site

       spires and spores

my metal head grinds
from a viscous carousel

heated by the boiling
polished ocean

and this September
a bell buzzing cold front

where i play a deflated
joke sunglazed by
porous voices  

Maxwell Rabb is the author of the chapbook Faster, the Whirl Wheel (Greying Ghost, Forthcoming 2023). He lives in New York City, leaving his heart in New Orleans, Chicago, and Atlanta. His poems have appeared in the Action Books Blog, Tagvverk, Mercury Firs, and Apogee, among others. He completed his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He co-edits GROTTO.