Dan has work forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, cream city review, Chattahoochee Review, Gigantic Sequins and Upstairs at Duroc.
Poems by Dan Encarnacion
Pater Noster.
What have you got that I want.
Big fat daddy plod plodding away.
Halcyon hams, Hephaestean calves, o so happy feet.
Unsynchronous butt-buccae gyrations that churn the primordial sea.
From whence first flopped a fish on land.
Slapped down upon its side and stared unblinkingly into the undaunted glare of the antediluvial sun.
Its uncensored eye blistered and dried, but still the fish thought, This is the place.
It is warm and bright, the cold tongue of the sea laps behind me.
The fish learned to breathe; that fish it learned to breathe.
Its fins popped out thinning into jointed limbs, webbing.
Turned to toes, they rotated like lashed Argonautical oars and propelled Mr. Fish’s flight forth.
To the golden fleece.
Yeah yeah yeah, big fat daddy, that fish began to walk.
Imagine that, dear daddy, Mr. Fish he starts to walk.
Imagine that, imagine that, o daddy, you’ve got to laugh.
Big fat daddy with your halcyon hams, Hephaestean calves, and o so happy feet.
Thanks to your big butt cheeks churning the primordial sea.
Thanks to your broad buttermilk breast and butterball’d belly.
Is that what I want from you, big fat daddy.
That fish that fish that frothing fish.
To guide me to a fleeting fleece.
The advent of life pictographed on the flanks of your bare beluga-barrel’d ass.
A canyon’s wall can radiate the story of its incremental formation.
A redwood’s rings can identify its age and detail its driven growth.
What should the striations in your round rump tell me.
How you were rewarded and punished as a babe?
How you were teased as a child and cast out as a teen?
How you were disgusted by the cult of muscularity screening you from offerings at the temple?
Focus on the ritual table, ceremoniously quiet repeat the feeding figures so that you may hear your body digest its amorousness.
Your accumulating ass rubbing its fraught faces like striking stones to spark the first flame.
Prometheus was a big boy, too, one of the biggest boys around.
Sacrificing his soft organs to bring man fire.
So that they may claim the magic of creation, the drift of dreams and sew the lips of their enfabling fears.
Adam lifting his index finger couched in your left melon seat.
God recumbently incumbent reubenesque in your honeydewed right.
Their stretched digits unmet for the slick dark cleft of your ass.
Yeah yeah yeah, big fat white daddy, your callipygian cheeks the evocation of life.
If all men were fat there would be no wars.
Round and round the mulberry bush round and round and round round round we go.
Where shall we stop nobody knows.
Is that what you’ve got that I want, big fat white daddy.
An epic removed from me.
So that I may identify with something other.
Than what I can identify within myself.
•
Room For Bobby
my roommate’s body on his bed after he’d hit his
last hit of meth smelt of damp dirty diapers
or fresh processed sewage incised by prised
perspiration—for four days dead behind a door
sealed stuck by his congealed fat cells
sucked into the thin air seams between the frames
and the door and shut windows— hottest weekend
of the summer —tried to pick the lock it felt
locked all it needed was a shove I saw his
bloated bare legs— couldn’t find the nerve
to follow where the purple kept going up—the
police weren’t sure if he was the white
man as pictured on his driver’s license—he had
told me he was going on a Mormon retreat
to end his addiction the next morning five days ago
—why should this be a poem enough it an account
julienned into breathable lines a resuscitation—
the body in the bag
was carried out while I went for a walk—our
landlady a Hindu grandmother downstairs
examined his body before the police arrived she
would clean up—my roommate’s provider had
always wanted to have sex with him he never wanted
to and pushed him away the provider left
my roommate turned into his room