Rune Christiansen
July 3, 2025
I take my leave of mother, she gives me / a key, but there is / no key, only her hand stretching out / and the goodbye
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I take my leave of mother, she gives me / a key, but there is / no key, only her hand stretching out / and the goodbye
I take my leave of mother, she gives me / a key, but there is / no key, only her hand stretching out / and the goodbye
I read something— / an idea worth noting, / and when I dog-eared the / page it bent easily / along the memory / of the previous crease, / someone else’s moment of / clarity
And in the end we are happy only when everything pauses,
and the fullness of the world fits
into the flutter of a curtain in wind
You say utterance is when word becomes law, is held or holds itself in the air like an accident of heaven.
When I told my mother she has dementia, / she said that of course she’d get dementia / because her mom had Alzheimer’s but // she doesn’t have that yet because she remembers
there is no time for tears, there never is; / no time for breathing deep. / A fit of sadness is like pulling a door that says push, / again and again, into eternity
An old man has been blocking my view. / Get out! I shout. He shouts it back. // I open my mouth. He inspects my teeth, / ducks out of view.
The big one was launched at dawn. Doesn’t matter / who sent it. Soon there will be others, / enough missiles to blanket the sky. I’m with you now, / under a willow, next to a pond, a crow is perched / on a rock hunting worms.
I know this silence / by heart, willed stillness, rotten // moon pulling itself through / the cavity of window.
There was nothing I could have done / about the life I was born into. / It was waiting for me, and I slipped into it / like a man waking up in a dream.
Even the curve of a conch shell / goes forever inward to an ending / too small for us to see. I put my ear / to it and hear Do not disturb my circles
My mother / paid for groceries one dollar bill / at a time. When I left home // she lost a third of her aid.
If our parents were here, they would already have sent us to bed. / And once again, I wouldn’t notice that it’s my younger brother / with whom I’m having the longest relationship of my life.
The big story is the old dog dying slowly, / half her mouth working tender bits / she is hand fed, strokes or tumor / or both, unsettling her stomach. / The big story, her good days, little one / her bad.
I dreamt kindness to animals was widespread, / Their demand on our powers greater and still greater. // If a rope broke, we released the herd. / If a drop of rain fell, we unveiled a flock of birds.
I know my neighbours by their walk. / Our walls are thin. A sort of string / between two cans, our stack of floors. / I hold it to my ear. It sings.
You can’t say he failed to choose a path in life, failed to make the sacrifice of choosing because there was nothing for him to choose at that time.
I took my nails into my thighs and smiled. I looked at your hands on the steering / wheel, drumming. I willed them to swerve us all into a tragedy tasting of concrete. / I suddenly saw myself in another ten years, still sitting there, humming.
no one cared, not then, not now, still what got lost & when, on the snowy side of a street, cold buildings cold book in hand inscribed in colored pencil no myth but those imagined & those at best misunderstood
A dog bites down on a stick of dynamite and takes off running. They are going to explode together. Imagine: making someone feel like that, making them lose their mind like that.
Such an itch you are / man I don’t quite know // all the things you might say / if we were on your terrace / with a beer
From a very young age my star stopped shining. / And among the many battles between life and death, / I discovered, I think by chance, the meaning of life.
He wishes he could experience the transition to evening / less like a hungry moth flapping its dust towards the magnetic / pools of light, more like a rare edition in the hands of tiny / librarians
Is this the murderer, or the wee nyaff / that kicks the hippocampus when I’m tired? / And should I yell or let it wander off, / my crisis just a detail on the ward / that nobody will log, unless I call?
Dear Bill: I’m sorry to hear you’re dead. / You hated the fig-leaf euphemisms / Of pulpit-jockeys who peddle heavens, / So you’d like me calling this spade a spade: // I died a bit myself, when I heard.
When the man in the row behind me / starts shouting that he wants off this plane, / I start thinking / how I’m not really in the mood to die today.
a lot of parenting is getting the first child to play / with the second child / so you don’t have to do it
Because we like flowers close to us we hold them / a little longer than their natural cycles. / See these four-hundred-year-old honeysuckles /
in Herrick’s poems. How his rhymes enfold them.
I can paint phrases that capture my man / veiled and leaning over a hive, ungloved hands / lifting frames aswarm with bees, finding the queen
There was a space at the table / for a child who’s face I’d already seen. / Who had arrived with a smile in the shape / of a blade. I composed a psalm because / I longed to make up a story that wasn’t true
sometimes a bottle // holds me like a tentpole / sometimes // it’s the other way round; and we bottle- /
neck / we flagship each-other.
Wine river of melted crowns / calls me home from the forest. // On the bank I drift, I mark / my bright axe laid down to rest.
My strangeness as unsavable / as the herd / on the other side of this wall / that will, at a single sound, run full tilt / into oncoming headlights
I am learning what men do and why they do it. Today, my father / teaches me fear. Mother watches from the house. I watch as if I am outside // myself
It’s something about the goats. / When I go to see them, they rush / to the side of the pen where I stand
those days won’t come back but at least we don’t have to talk in complete sentences now
Your laughter. / It seems so harmless. / A roof made of boulders. /
Things inside your body that have never gotten out.
When the rain slowed, I walked the dog / from whom I wrested one bottlecap, one shoe. // Clicked on a link to a network of bail funds, / found my country, my state. Hovered.
See if anyone is / watching. No one is // watching. The water laps / around you like applause.
Nobody wants to hear a white guy going on about / the black people he has known, especially not / a white guy who hasn’t known many black people
Role play is harder / alone in the hotel room, / it being more difficult / to suspend disbelief / single-handedly.
And because I was not good, I did not step inside / the ark. The flood came and went and my body, // in rebuke of the enemy, became one with ground.
What is there / but great silence, waiting, / and serving time in the body / before returning home
We called it chemo brain—forgetting the names / of people, places, familiar objects
At the theater we recognize the movie is us. / All kinds of awful things are happening. / The ocean has covered houses so they barely stick out / like broken teeth.
We remember, wrapped in black ropes that swayed / me, a cradlesong in the embrace of the snake, / our hearts cracked to cast together better.
Once, a teacher / told me—Need is a bad word. She // stood in front of the class, frowning / at its long ‘e’ sound, as a mother // might frown at her young child / who’s just peed her pants.
I’m five years old / again, refusing to wear Bermuda / shorts, begging mom to buy only / long pants, long enough to hide / my iron brace
For instance, I cup my hand over his heart / and it’s like a hand over a heart. // For instance, outside a couple of / night birds / are singing like birds singing at night. // It’s beautiful enough / to name this world —
You can’t recreate the first taste of an orange. Which is not just sunshine, bright and radiant, bursting in a mouth but the shock of it and the moment just before the peel, the seal is broken. Every orange after chases memory.
I am a bird. I have a cloaca. Piss/shit/eggs rush out / the one hole. Cock goes in that hole too.
they have her anyway, laugh about it in the locker rooms, student / center, and physical science room, hawking globs of tobacco on the / tile
Shopping center. A boy of about six trailing his parents—skinny kid with tousled hair, three of them heading toward their car.
“If we weren’t in this parking lot I’d slap the shit out of you,” the mother says to the boy.
The / brute of war engorges man / and beast, the clash of iron / on steel makes loud / even the less-endowed organ.
My body opens like a highway sinkhole. It’s a baby someone shouts and I know they are wrong. It’s a baby I shout, still wrong.
We’ve worked / for this / intimacy—
/ me, letting go / of my need / to know, // you, trusting me / to let you / be.
Why do they want to see pictures / of what they looked away from / in disgust?
People never want to leave the party, do they? Drinks full, lips / red, lies told to the point of truth. We’re waiting out the silence.
I’m a fair sacrifice. Steel tools pass in and out of me / like parishioners through the threshold / of a heavy door. My flesh holds too much / that I cannot see.
The street was quiet. A dog pissed on my motorbike chain / & I waved away the smell with my hand. / I got home, I gathered up my cat Zelda, / we listened to Leonard Cohen “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” …
this toddler toddles up to my table / and says Hi over and over, like fifty times, / or maybe he’s saying high because honestly / he’s behaving like a meth head who just got / out of a mental hospital
two children are rolling side by side / through images projected on the floor: // a train runs across the wheat field in Montmajour / onto their T-shirts
I google the name of the bird that is looking at me. / The black bird with red on its wing is called / the Red-winged Black Bird. / This has given me confidence in naming the rest.
We ate our youth from the knife. / Night fishing trips, moonlit dates, / and you, a jug-eared hero, / burnt yourself with naked girls’ flesh, / like with hot fish soup.
October 25, 1917 and the place is Petrograd, Russia, / and the horse pulling my stagecoach is whipped / mercilessly all the way to the Mariinsky Theater
He was my best friend in 2nd grade / and 3rd grade and maybe 4th grade too. I don’t remember / when it happened exactly, but he had a sledding accident / at the bottom of that hill
I will never entirely approve of the Frenchmen I meet, because they will never be the true Frenchman I apprehended in childhood.
I’m adorably playful while he never says / anything about my own womanly tush / (because he’s not insane) or my clothes or tits.
We are in bed talking about Queen Elizabeth’s death / and the ascendance of Charles to the throne. / “They should have made me king,” I say. / “You?” she says. “You’re too lazy to be king.”
As if without a man, winter could take over. / But I loved winter, love winter still, so / what am I trying to say?
My violence astonishes me some days, the way I regard the lesser / goldfinches in the lavender, each the size of a thumb, I want / to cram them into my mouth
I would tell him I told the officer you didn’t rape me. Because I was awake that morning before six. Because I was dressed for work. For the world.
Trust my inabilities. They are / reliable as gold. Count on the / gravity of my fragility. It will / always let you down.
He holds the cigarette far out on his fingers. Like they teach in acting class. Tight to the chest. Tough guy. Tip of the fingers. Aristocrat.
I have been asked to teach / a workshop at the public library / about found poetry and I / do not know what that is.
The suspension slips pile up / like maple leaves in October. / The golem’s parents enlist a therapist / and a tutor, a rabbi and a cool college student / from the Troubled Youth Mentor Center.
All I really want are the Seven Wonders / of a Marriage. Find me standing in line for / the Marvels of Your Many Moods.
Your books, I still can’t find them. / For years, when I remembered to, I looked. // Your legacy: an image of a split head / bleeding into a river.
Even / though I loiter on the cliff / of a love that wants me, I refuse / to fall.
oh I love / how a tree bisects our garden / so we can reunite every time / we stumble on the other side / of our legs
After I’ve spent all day talking about concentration camps, my father tells me to get him out of this concentration camp. It’s his birthday.
Before homo sapiens, the woods on this hill / were thick as a young bride’s wedding-night-tangled hair, / coronet of sunlight bedazzling / a canopy miles above moist earth
I throw my voice / to the end of my life and what comes back / is bird chatter, dog whimper, a bow drawn / across a cello’s neck.
All pilgrimage is trans · / position of the throat and hands / palming prayers into the crooks of an unfamiliar / coastline
See how possum’s eldritch teeth chatter — a warning of the way the lowly can take the diseased into body, break it like bread.
The children find themselves farther than they are. To return home means to earth. In their eyes, forest. In their hearts, more forest.
You have grown enough to know / that everything will kill you if you let it.
Someone please remind me that it is okay / to feel terror and a terrible sadness at the visceral forge / where our friendship passes now into my sole keep.
I cut the line, honk my horn, chew with a full mouth, / then burp. The piercings in my ears have closed, / my heart has closed. And my clothes? I’ve stopped / doing laundry.”
This Radha, unlike the one I spend most of my waking life with, drives a car with impeccable accuracy, almost as if she has eyes at the back of her head. This Radha, though cold and calculating, has been having sex with many men behind my back.
I imagine you were born / a breathless fish. // And they saved you.
There’s something grounding about a god who knows his place. Yet there’s something terrifying about a god who knows how to bring us down with him.
Husbands are not so hard to make: / my father is three microwaves / stacked on top of each other.
Away from the key rattle of an office, / exiled from a bathroom, a school, a hospital / into you I return like the scratch on a vinyl
Raised to be polite, / I offered each lawyer / tiny sweets, iced / water with a bitter twist
There are things ha-ha funny about going / blind though. Like that time he walked / wearing a three-piece wool suit into the deep / end of a swimming pool in a hotel in Italy.
Maybe the witch wasn’t a witch at all, not to start with at least. She was just a mother who couldn’t feed her babies …
The baby onesie I stitched in the garage / became a colony of ants that nightly streamed / down my cheeks.
My joy / comes shot through with longing / it will not linger / for days like that acid gas. / I might have only moments / left before this exhilaration / dissipates
she is rising alone, pirouetting to her balcony / to throw her sapphires onto the street / as the audience gazes, she is laughing
I want bicycles to be my last word, my dying word — / not I love you, or bless you, or God forgive me, / but bicycles.
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