“Are you radioactive, pal?
Pal, radioactive.”
John Berryman (51st Dreamsong)
Dragontooth Children
Cold sheet we all
Rub together
For the heat
(not the ions)
no shoe, new shoe, empty
(not bereft)
prowl the street mutter back
and growl, again, we do
(not grudge, not taunt)
and we mutter
you do right, my man
you do right
don’t be bitter or you
hurt your own soul bad
don’t be bitter
for your own soul’s sake
just be bluesed
(Good God, my boogie suit
is “just burst into flame”)
and be bluesed
(my shoes, the very same,
catch a fire, just go out
dancin’, self-ways)
be thou bluesed like old
shoes scuffle up outside the Zone (steady keening)
klic-klic echo pass you by this street
of unstrung soldiers leaking conjures
tired curses, questions always
more bloody questions
like why now why this low-down moon
rubs me so ugly
like why now why this wind, this hawk
thing calling: Mrs. Bones
cross my face
and twist like new snow
make a hiss like a stone up top
a sky down below
calling: Mrs. Bones
Mrs. Bones calling
off a frozen prairie
and I shiver
(like a reflex but far away from it)
and I listen
(ear to earth down eons of isms)
and I shiver
(as all flesh shall, in the end,
crawl down)
and I listen
(for the arco on the downlow)
and I shiver, listen, shiver:
there’s blood on the wheat chaff
hard moonlight leaves its own special scar
(like “soul-flight to the sun”)
there’s blood on the wheat chaff
black fallow loam don’t look
don’t walk out there
’til the moon’s gone down
But hey, grow my own mouth
wide open like a movie star
Dragontooth Children all hatch
when the weather goes bad
Dragontooth Children all hatch
and march together
all together tight
(like Busby Berkeley’s
Lush-Cosmopolis, not
so very much)
in a jagged circle tight
(more and more like Leni
Riefenstahl’s Deco-Thug
chorea)
in a straight line locked, all together
tight all together:
we
can’t kick that rhythm
’til sun don’t hiss like snow no more
then goodbye, goodbye, Mrs. Bones,
goodbye
then goodbye rumor, too
taste it in the air
in the moonlight in the dust
I do
around my skin I draw
an Ellipse of Uncertainty
and squeeze some further ichor
pure blood at the vuln
(or just a flood of
profane lightnin’, maybe)
from Soren K’s retro “Either / Or” tattoo
staying on right here
I will, between steel
and its own shadow
some say: it’s a good place to visit,
but to hide?
(or just fake a daily
dose?)
I don’t know?
Dragontooth Children ain’t no lack
of Dragontooth Children
come a scuffle up we
search a sky for the good fight
and a glow
and we bring bad weather with us
and our mother is bad weather
and we sing loud to our mother
John Sullivan received the “Jack Kerouac Literary Prize,” “Writers Voice: New Voices of the West” award, AZ Arts fellowships (poetry / playwriting), Artists Studio Center fellowship, WESTAF fellowship, was a featured playwright at Denver’s Changing Scene Summer Play (Changing Scene Theatre), and an Eco-Arts Performance fellow from EMOS / University of Oregon. He was Artistic/Producing Director of Theater Degree Zero, and directed the Augusto Boal / Theatre of the Oppressed focused applied theatre wing at Seattle Public Theater. For the past decade, he has used Theatre of the Oppressed with communities in the Deep South to promote dialogue on cumulative risk / environmental justice issues with NIEHS environmental health scientists. He was selected as a juried poet for the 2016 iteration of the Houston Poetry Festival.
