MONTAGE

The French Trees of Cinema

french girl blowing her french smoke in my anglo-hungarian face as I think about montage as an answer to this life a different kind of flashlight asking after the reason for things a whip of proselight darkstill brainlost in mexico under the french trees of cinema flowering with red beetles candied in nectar and my hummingbird eyes coughing on all that

Chain

that chain
is painted with
links other than
its own

I said
in the forked past
where we
folded shade

into other
timelines
locked off
from each other

with ink
for fingers
drawing smiles
through cuts

sealed within
chests of horn
hunting for
another chain

Candy

read one text with one eyeball and another text with the other eyeball in tandem for what they are together convenience store mirrors coins in corners of pentagons pearls on dresses in flemish pictures, time, bending the room the indented eyesurface the candydish candy rolled around mouth-tuned words that dome and lobe you

Favourite Number

this blind alley hangs from the afterimage of a collapsed
dream

this grinder disk screams like a pig with a hatchet
view

this red beetle turns in a matchbox of quarried
stone

this poem breaks in five pieces remembering its favourite
number

this talk in tomb rafters is the laughter of birds in
sugarcane

this fire slips off a nightmare’s
throat

this finger fits a keyhole longer than
space

Eyepoem II

you painted eyes on your toenails
they watched us while we slept
ten cameras
they didn’t see us
they didn’t see our dreamlife

— Dustin Cole is the author of the novel Notice (Nightwood Editions) and the poetry chapbook Dream Peripheries (General Delivery), as well as the forthcoming novel Run the Bead (Soyos Books). He has also contributed writing to APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, Maximus Magazine, The Crank, Rango Tango, Version (9), Expat, Safety Propaganda, BC BookWorld, Heavy Feather Review and the British Columbia Review.