Purity of Heart

when I open my eyes the world
makes small adjustments
like everyone is suddenly not
wearing a tuxedo
they are tearing a hole
in the center of the road
digging furiously with shovels
and bulldozers
everyone is doing this even the dark
ages and Kierkegaard
though he calls it prayer

when the city tells us something
we think it is true
we are gullible that way

pick a point and look at it
until you are the point and more
than a little afraid of the person
staring at you
this is called
the bicameral effect
it is a subway
we love underground

being is such a small word
but at least it brings its own shovel
today we woke with eyes closed
the sharp sound of steel
glittering everywhere

Skypenis in the UK
after Bob Hicok

My lungs think about openings. Hell,
they deify them—the circleholegod
that carries us through the dark.

On a back road near Edinburgh,
someone littered a whole newspaper’s worth
of nude women. The only other roadkill
was birds.

The plan: stop running long enough
to build a machine that will finally
make the lightning love me.
Cons: this machine will think it is god
and stitch smoke words to lungs.

The women run from the dark roads
and point a gun at my past
which is to say the gun is my penis tied
in a loop. All they say is bang.

Trying

the same exits

but now they’re sun-shaped

to help you repeat your mistakes

my thoughts lift me by their hook

there was a before where I didn’t think

transformation was possible

where rivers stood still with

their knees on their banks

and their hands

clasped over a god

try not trying until the dying live

try crying in the body of a valley

where the sun can rest

Mike Bagwell is a form of mutual antagonism towards the sky. He received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and recent work appears in Poetry Northwest, Action Spectacle, ITERANT, Sprung Formal, Tyger Quarterly, Annulet, and others. Recent chapbooks include Poem of Thanks: A Court of Wands (Metatron 2025), A Collision of Soul in Midair (Bottlecap), and micros from Ghost City and Rinky Dink. He runs the Ghost Harmonics reading series in Philly. Find him at mikebagwell.me, @low_gh0st, or playing dragons with his daughters.