Back When God Was a Smell, I Was a Dog

Poems for Ongoingness

Collectively we are a mess. Personally I’m close to burn out yet doing things that I deeply care about. I’m curious about how I can balance my body with my creative fire. Is it possible? This week I’m sharing some older poems from chapbooks I hope to republish in the year to come. I am breathing in smoke from my favorite mountain forests burning. I feel these fires in my extended flesh, brain, self. My web of kin. We are fevered. Brittle. We are starbursts of photon combustion and fragmented carbon. Laced into lungs as smoke. I don’t have the means yet to make this a story.

back when god was a smell, I was a dog

There are no wise men, only wise dogs.

They follow trees, bark down

the big gods, turn mountains into scat,

warm leaf mulch. All belief is monochromatic:

pulped into smells, linden in late

June, realization of perpetual

death, chrysanthemum made with the same

symbol for powdered skeleton, in scent