Mark Russell

INSURANCE (2)

He said that he could not continue.
I am in the middle of the night
Without critical habitat, without a key,
Just a dream of a city clean
Of these kind of broken dates.
There is no door.
He wants to enter his phone number
In my ass. This won’t work.
Millions of eyes tore off
The end of the evening,
Dive! he cried. Convert!
He put the box in the clock
But tomorrow it will close.
During Happy Hour I give him hair.
I make sure I read the dead.
They take me to the 4 a.m. op.
This is the stage when you want
Monsoon clouds,
To undo these changes,
Undo all the edits.

FIRE AND ICE

I love my country when it’s on fire
and I am on fire. It is so fresh.
It cannot be resolved. It is too hot.

I burn a portion of my skin,
boil more and more countries,
I remove their frozen hearts.

Anything else is a miracle,
is love in ice, is fire resolved.

TO A WOMAN AT THE AGE OF THE POOR

Chewing on plums
paper bag
them in her hand

Yo
Delicious
Delicious
They
Delicious
Delicious
To
She

You can see it in the following ways:
how they give her themselves
half
sucked in her hand

Comfort
a ripe plum consolation

Suppose the knot
protruding
is air filling

They delicious to she

SAMPLE IMAGE 4

use welcome for silver
water-smooth the bad
break the pigeons
just like that

one two three four five
Jesus

there was a fair man
and what you want to know is
are we pregnant
or blue-eyed
death?

Mark Russell’s pamphlet Pursued by Well-being is published by tall-lighthouse. He has other poems in various publications such as Poetry Salzburg Review, Antiphon, Gutter, and The Frogmore Papers. The poems here are part of a sequence of other people’s poems that have been repeatedly battered through the many languages of Google Translator.