The Rules

This faucet coughs up a frail, whitish water
and my glass swallows.

I push the handle down. Now it’s off.
Silence hovers at my back.

I look down at this glass’s oval rim,
its incandescent gaping mouth,

and remember the carp lying brainless
on the glistering river

Julys ago. Sun clawing, sun held down
by the muggy water.

And that carp with its eyelids sprung back for good.

Pure night pouring out of its eyeballs,
unstoppable.

All of it right there, in all its obvious wonder—and what vowel is it,
the one lodged in the back of its jaw—

I do not care what the black flies say.

The Whole Story

Radically speaking, here is my room.

The chair right there, brown, with a small back.

And the small glass, opening with a candle.

And the water pricked with light outside—there is
an outside—insignificant except for the clarity

it gives the windows. And clarity—
let’s just do it—is life.

*

This blue chair is not angry, just soft
and half a couch.

The wall spreads up but will not go too far.
And the ceiling pushes it down, gently,

and these socks—

no not today these socks. I have no

need to tell you
my wish that is already mine.

*

And if poetry,
if poetry is anything,

then anything.

And the light in here has terrible posture.

Like its mother I will tell it.

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Originally from central Pennsylvania, Sam Bailey has most recently published in Colorado Review and Dialogist. Bailey is currently a religious studies PhD student at Harvard studying theopoetics in 21st century American verse. He is also the managing editor of Peripheries.