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Clade Song 16

GROCERY STORE HELIUM

saw a heart-shaped balloon
ascending fast
over the bowling alley

clouds waiting to absorb it

it was trembling over
the drive-in arcadium

I wonder if
all of those balloons

eventually fall into
the oceans

get sucked up by leviathans
and those whale songs they sing

are deep depths’

Valentines?

 
Goanna snow skink Goanna darter slug coyote

Joseph Victor Milford has been a professor of literature on the ground and in the cloud for almost 25 years now. He has two collections of poetry out currently Cracked Altimeter (BlazeVox Press) and Tattered Scrolls and Postulates, (Backlash Press). He currently lives in Alabama and is working on completing a translation of the I-Ching hexagrams into iambic pentameter, and he is also working on a book of poems about his childhood in Alabama, called Tapephobia, which includes these three poems published in this issue of Clade Song.