Brandon Menke

Leather Idol

cybernetically escutcheoned

his wrist & a thick finger
points the way

with no hint of surety

pantomiming the lyric: how do you feel? I’m lonely
convinced of sex

its ability to market

a snakeskin belt tied to the door
buckle broken by the blush
of his heartthrob neck

plectra clipped exactly
voicing his strings the nightshade family

tempts with
a duplicitous thrill

Fleet June

the orange mesh of the sand
sieve overwhelms

the jubilant mini-trees

chartreuse
flower heads of pineappleweed

pseudofossils on cleaves of shale
our expectations streak

heat lightning bedeviling
the river bluff catalpas thick

with marriage

& between your lips a currant
bursts ripening

Ulticrostic

According with Bowie’s “Crystal Japan”

Scatter these seeds & these ashes over the sea

Retaining yarrow, its sugar-sulfur presentment

For your pastel sketch

Of caravel-cruised waters off Costa Brava

Frothy as the dialogue in a Van Vechten

Novella. Who demands, Perfect your hanami—

Seeing Korean dogwood proliferate

Toward completing the vernissage of spring? Parallel

To a column of air

Your mouth left dizzied & warm, transpose into

The higher keys

All the transmissions you receive

From these attendant spirits, so voluble, so plain

Auden pearling under alders, Schuyler in camellia light

Mishima, grease-slick & steaming, accept your touch

Like the pages of a gilt encyclopedia

This may not, no, cannot be just another ephemeral

Embowered by a thousand Delphi

Oracles, the pentimenti of their glaucous words

Brandon Menke is a poet and postdoctoral scholar at the University of Notre Dame, where he will be an Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies starting this fall. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University and his MFA in poetry from New York University. His critical and creative work appears or is forthcoming in The Yale Review, Court Green, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Post45: Contemporaries, bæst: a journal of queer forms & affects, Columbia Journal, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives with his partner in South Bend, Indiana.