Five Poems by Sebastian Hunter

CHAUCER

In a velvet armchair
fibbing about the citizenry he’s met
the concierges greenish on nanny cam
and other functions of the perforated realm

Have you read his latest book?
Masculine Tears and the Men Who Shed Them?
Painted in gouache on wattle

It entered my soul like drip-fed
continental breakfast at the Daybreak Inn

One husk of a man thrummed his lute

SOFT STORY

The world and its debilitating sense of
Power Glove for the madam
Plans fall into place, etc.
I can almost hear myself drive past
rows of gaping
Vancouver specials
pointed downhill to the water
Slender columns suspend the turn-ons
She joins me in my prayer for Fabergé,
years of prayer

ANABOLIC STEROIDS

Of course I'm agentic, you think they'd
let me in here otherwise?
Check the gleam against two fifths and I
am on my way downmarket, dating fellow alumni
with radiant-like natures
Ritualized passions, gasp
Streaming politics into your brainstem
I realized I was trying to describe the wind

POKER TELLS

To live is to court the fee
To blow his beauty on wool
Hundreds of half-sexy, probably somebody’s cousin
Looking for a community or tax cuts
But first let's have ourselves a child

ANZAC DAY

I assumed the fictions were smuggled
out of a long and gradual decline
(shuttered mills on a day ending in any)
Someone hands someone a lightbulb
symbolizing Antarctic exploration for the hegemon's hegemon
Cans & bottles & a glass of liquid melatonin
Say "I love you" in the metric system or a penned-in rural state

We think such ugly things about our neighbors.
The cattle are on trial
but the butcher can't prove anything.



Sebastian Hunter is a poet and drummer from Seattle. Poems recent and forthcoming in Bethh, Trampoline, Midcult, Capgras, and High Horse.