<< Back to Issue 6.2

False Consciousness

They say the last sound you hear vibrates in the public pension office

keeping dawn’s neon like a fever before a reliquary,

One or two people wait there like oxide wash and linseed oil on wallpaper,

waiting to be licked by animals or night’s planned fires.


I am only interested in descriptions of non-conceptual art. Dragons

abducting gloves into bone-white sedans. Across a lake at water’s edge

a policeman holds his head, pairs of dead hands reach through windows

toward the walk littered with peels, various citrus    you smell fresh to death


I was a child with an oak leafed chaplet mumbling a civic prayer.

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Oren Silverman’s recent work has appeared in the “Say Hello To Your Last Reading” chapbook series, published by New Lights Press, and in the Denver Poetry Map. Originally from Brooklyn, he lives in Denver and works in a building designed for Houston.