kinpaurak

three poems by Will Cordeiro

I. How to Listen
A breeze whooshes through the branches. Birdsongs chirrup. A baggy, ragged work shirt flaps upon a clothesline nearby. The fountain in the little park plashes back into itself, dappled and giddy. If you bend down, you can discern a line of ants scraping along the flagstone walk; the sewage pipes guggling and belching below us. You can hear the clouds fermenting overhead, brindled dark, traipsing elsewhere; even the sun which burns the day down like a slow fuse. The whole laggard panorama chances by, lurid with melisma, with hidden oracular whimpers of longing. A lissome smattering of pingbacks. The gone-before-it’s-there enigma of sound fossicking about down the shell-torqued cilia and tintinnabulatory ossicles. The human figure is a large antenna. A maundering headsink of gritty,amorous matter obstreperously bobbles at the core of things, oozing from one form to another. A pool of oily draff in the cobblestoned runnels coddles and spoils. Everything’s the skin of a tambour. Everything’s a plectrum whirring from touch. Eerie hums churr from the wires. Ice sheets calve beneath the earth’s crust. Transducers zap about, rattling. Magnetic fields muzzily purr and effervesce. Energy blips. Static orbs natter and echo. A susurrous mizzling roars from the depths. Quarks crash shoreward in great freaks of lustrous, blustering traces. There are overtones and timbres, euphonious tinklings and sonic textures reverberating through the air—radio waves, satellite signals. Telluric currents, solar winds, celestial vibrations. The elements pitch and ring, a restless furor. A clamorous, a ribald katzenjammer. All meanings scatter down into the dibbled loam and then rise again, en masse, a vasty lamentation like a moan. Ever a babel of juvenation keens with searing tongues of flame, the steady smokeless fires of decay. The strings that compose the fundamental dimensions propagate and shiver, ghosting our cosmos: reality bodes forth. The voices of the dead, across the thresholds of space and time, induce a slight continuous tinnitus in the ears.
II. Beached
I squat dockside on a lard can, hocking a loogie. Rank barges of garbage move slowly to harbor then plow out, overloaded, through foaming drifts of their own garbled slurry. The restless geometries of oil-stains prism through the dull wash of crosscurrents like tosspots, a spurious mercury leaching into a listless abysm. Sun riddles the snot-thick slush-slop into shards of phosphorous. A quibbling wiggery of gulls hovers above each trash pile. Floating islands of instability. The mudflats peekaboo like petticoats. Reeking and slewing. Low tide hiccups then coagulates. Implacable in its assurance. A fretting yet stoic slosh, muddled of meaning or motive. Little bubbling crabs skitter, scatter, and scoot. Day’s addendum deliquesces into a black tar amassed from ancient saurians and ferns. There is no place: only an illimitable sillage, a vast disorient. Everything a mere ballast. Dankly moiling, restless, resistless, the muckscape—shucking within me, scuttlebutting over the scud and scoria without—sinks and scrapes down, slag-like and sluggishly, until it’s all callused with diamonds.
III. Nightfall
       From ooze of swamp hair, something’s skipping.
    Dank evening air. A fat orange moon.
Where grubby salamanders scribble

       mudflats, cattails switch and plume.
    Split deadfall trickles, ditches dripping,
damp banks where vagrants dump their boon.

       We’ve kicked (for kicks) spilt limbs asunder,
    a carnival of rubbish splayed
where halfcocked mushrooms quench their hunger.

       Midges splutter; larvae skate
    smudged, algal pools. The mayflies saunter
daylight’s marvels, fresh from cradles

       twilight squanders. Tadpoles shiver.
    Marsh stalks wander seeping cricks
where brackish gloss divides the river.

       We limp scrimped footpaths past the sticks.
    Frail striplings, stomped-on stumps of litter,
crimped beer cans lumped in stickled thickets.

       I stub a cigarette. Your jacket’s
    stained. Our bare feet spattered. Weeds 
flush with junk. Fish guts, antlers, bracken...

       I piggyback you. Centipedes
    replete with poison wriggle this back-
water. Fleet creatures interbreed

       and suckle on their antidotes.
    I take a drag; you sip my flask.
The last dregs slake and scald your throat.

       Shades vault the lakeside’s scattered frass.
    Strip down. Swim out. Then drift and float
on moon-rimmed pools of overcast.

Will Cordeiro has published work in 32 Poems, AGNI, Bennington Review, Pleiades, and The Threepenny Review. Will is the author of Trap Street (Able Muse, 2021) and Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024) as well as co-author of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024) and the forthcoming New Foundations of Creative Writing (Bloomsbury, 2026). Will co-edits Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Kinpaurak