Andrew Faulkner

BIG SIGHS

What’s not to like? Days coast in
and then coast out on a frothy surf,
as if surfing from one foam latté
to the next was the good life.
If coasting’s got us this far, then surely
the truncated garden hose dangling
from a gas tank like a necktie
will get us the rest of the way.

Up here in the rafters—and stop me
if you’ve heard this one—I’ve staged
a small pageant to sort our various passions.
The resemblance to a smokestack is uncanny,
obnoxious, an accordion that hugs

its inner turmoil and wheezes.
What a production, music,
how it works you like a pro.
And by you I mean me,
and by me I mean I’ve tried to be good
to you in my own way, carried
you with me like a flask in your time of need.
You with your airplane heart and me,
a bad mechanic, leaving a wrench
like an extra bone in your landing gear.
You’re so cute by the light of the evening news,
fuselage scattered desperately across a stretch of asphalt
like sun-starved foreigners on a beach.
Oh, the bodies of sweat that drip from us.



Andrew Faulkner co-curates The Emergency Response Unit, a chapbook press. He is the author of the chapbooks Mean Matt and Other Shitty People and Useful Knots and How to Tie Them, which was shortlisted for the 2009 bpNichol Chapbook Award. His first full-length collection, Need Machine, will be published by Coach House Books in April 2013.