Tyler Flynn Dorholt

Spring '24

On this train or to arrange from
thoughtless struggle to aim
we remove the brood
in a lapse of liberty
I am often as free as you like me
to be but also swept up
what is instinct if alone
poured into stripes in the back of bars
as we have traveled
on rooftops to re-calculate expanse
climbing that thought right out
of a cigarette
premiering in deferments
I can still fall senseless into this music
even if love tries to ruin shadows
are tossed into the abandoned
season and how lust collages nostalgia
or that home is hours
boxed in from the street
for imprint and style
I'm going to stay
with the plants that are moving
wear the wind for a while
inside the animal slur
how we cure a river
and all its bones in stones
to continue is to interact
with seconds salute
resolving sounds
to pause at a tree
pull up the remaining questions
if we save this glance
we draw ourselves within it.

On the long route toward reach
extension always starts behind the tongue
are the trees less than
their leavings
we have strung up the buckwheat
to centralize berries
and our attitude toward topless stars
in advertised highs
to get past what is getting on by
time and circumstance
a back-up singer imbibing all the way
to the car and moving miles out of
calamities like windows rattle
sun between wires
breathing into perpetual replays
for or from dissonance
speaking with the feathered blades
of inertia to blurt out in back code
our upbringing in fashion
its congruent nodes meaning nothing
for this mood or moon
but on this train you are
rushed to repeat resolution
pixels or what you no longer want
so start and stop if the sun spins
all the way through dust
how we must remain as locals
kept on in corner stores
and slowly dying inclusion
nobody shows up and this
is where you can be yourself.

Here in the laugh totaled
by dead grass drag or an adornment
of asides strangers get a grip on
dearth I’m not recalling correctly
the intimacy of interpose
back to ethers we seek outside
ourselves another round
for remaining
if I don't reach you
I have fallen out of pace
with silence and migration
here inside the kitchen a knife
takes the condition
to begin electronic
wandering into woods
to flip inside ourselves
matchstick tailbone
the struck-off lungs
idling where purpose is relative is
unrelatable content on a stupor
I can look back to the drum
line around our absence
but still the cymbals shine toward
back rooms of a serious
and calculated suffering
these floors above and below us
so that we push at number
and skim the ground.

Tyler Flynn Dorholt is Director of the Writing Program and Assistant Professor at the College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, NY, where he teaches storytelling and creative writing. He is the author of the photography and prose book AMERICAN FLOWERS, and his visual and written work has been anthologized and appeared widely in journals and spaces such as BOMB, American Letters and Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Project Newsletter, the Everson Museum of Art, and elsewhere. He has published numerous chapbooks and poem films and he is the co-editor and publisher of the press and magazine, Tammy.