Sequence Number 1.

In the first paragraph

the reader understands

her intention. A string

of liquor blues. Lover

walks out of a movie,

and daylight makes her fall.

The second paragraph

ends with him. Understand

this wasn’t meant to string

together like this. Over

decades, sexes make moves,

change like leaves in the Fall.

But this, he ended. Graphed

it in a map while she stands

in a question. A string

hung from the table. “Love,

at what rate do thoughts move?”

His head and gaze, empty, fall.

The ending paragraph

he will not understand

as she pulls the long string

from the table to her lover’s

neck. His eyes turn. Movie

ending. Watch the man fall.

When instructed to write a poem about owls

All I could come up with was the old man
following me home from the Erotica reading.
Eyes like espresso beans. Sidewalks glazed
with a trail of street light and women
in pulled petticoats opening maps
resembling their placentas in ruin.

While the man from Mexico city swirls to night
shadows like white gas
I think, why he couldn´t be the Frenchman from the night before
who spoke metaphysically about my physical body.
If so, I’d be a ball of dough walking backwards
into his trousers, pushing past the playground
teetering back and forth on jungle equipment.

Alas, I’m stuck with the albino bald eagle
flying into the crag my of my back.

The trouble is the nights
just go on and on and on and on…

Kiely Sweatt has been living in Barcelona the last three years teaching English, translating and writing poetry. She started up the Prostibulo Poetico, in partnership with the Poetry Brothel, Poetry Society of NYC. She has since helped to start working on branches in Madrid, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia and Venezuela. She is co organizer of Tri Lengua, a multi lingual reading series in Barcelona, which looks to promote overseas writers of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. She holds a degree in Spanish Literature from WVU and an MFA in poetry from The New School. Her work has appeared online and in-print through such publications as The Why and the Later by Carly Sachs, Best American Poetry blog, Shampoo, Sawbuck Review, BCN Ink, and PSEUDÒNIMS.