SELECT POEMS
"MAKE GOOD OF THE DEAD" — TOWN CREEK POETRY, FALL 2012
No one wants to say things about the boy
or the girl or the man because
the molded face in the open casket
is dead and looks dead.
We wander around the empty room
searching for old conversations we had
with the deceased, but it could be years
if we decide to dig up those bones.
Fir trees know how to make good of the dead
by fingering through softened, fibrous skin
(as if grasping for the heart)
and unabashedly growing up out of a corpse.
And who knows better than the moss,
that bejeweled, pubic robe crawling over
the naked trunk, crotch and limbs of the dead?
Moss, you second-skin, spell the bronze
stones of the earth into the fecund howl,
cracking forth, beaming—light (O God) into light.
"THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOLF" — TOWN CREEK POETRY, SPRING 2013
THE KNIFE COLLECTOR, FUTURECYCLE PRESS — NOVEMBER 2013
runs over spinal ridges. She’s been spotted
in Gentry, Rodgers, Bella Vista.
Tracks measured at five by four, her coming
and going, nakedly undetectable.
Overhead, a red-tailed hawk flies
as satellite to the most beautiful wolf.
Between is corn-dust, fiber-needle
mapping the air spiritual.
Gray blur gnawing into blue sky,
she moves liquid as dolphin-shadow.
Her hair grows of the old man’s nose;
her eyes gleam sun, puddle on a Magnolia leaf.
Her teeth strike, the flash of knives turning
into flesh: skin lacera and blood-swamp.
By each thorn-spur, you will sing her mercies.
“The Knife Collector is one of the most striking first collections I have read. His poems are clear-eyed and, often dreamlike, as they carry the reader through landscapes half-familiar while igniting something deeper than memory. Indeed, Breite’s work depends on the elemental just as much as it does biography—this is not a mere collection of anecdotes, but a poetry that works for all it can give, a set of truths made more believable and more significant via a masterful blending of the real and the mythic.”
—William Wright, senior editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology and author of Night Field Anecdote
"OZYMANDIAS, BORN AGAIN" — LIME HAWK REVIEW, SUMMER 2015
Walking the blue streets of Atlanta,
the old pavement curves
and writhes like a thick, glyphic skin.
Hardwood roots tentacle-up
from below and ripple the road
with convex dimples.
Electricity travels over our heads
through fat-bellied wires,
black snakes strung
by stripped posts. The air is heavy
with wireless radiation,
the dark human magic of signals
juicing up the cellular night,
the skyline’s neon blush.
I hold the hand of my lover,
and the city lights candy our eyes.
But the dirt is voracious,
and it will wait centuries for supper.
The stones know the monstrosity
of its patience, its quiver
and throb. Lord, this is what
we call forgiven: a dank, spindling
root swelling its tongues
in the darkness of dead bodies
that once coruscated
with bulbs of light, of light …
of artificial light.
"CRAZY MARY & THE SHARECROPPER'S SON" — CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW, 2016
Maybe she thought that easy line—
Whatever you want to do is alright with me—
was for her, Mary Woodson White,
perhaps it was for her—the one who walked
into Al Green’s Memphis mansion,
to find her sometime lover on a Friday?
Maybe it was because four months earlier,
“Let’s Get Married” shot up the charts,
and she waited for a parallel lyric,
something more than the skinny shirtless man
pulling a fantasy gun on Greatest Hits ’75?
Whatever moved her, it must’ve been
a torrid spell—only got by scalding grits
flung on his back while he settled in a warm tub
and by a bullet, right then, to her own head—
and it must’ve been hell enough to drop him
to his knees at his sharecropper daddy’s church,
to raise him up in the Full Gospel Tabernacle
for the rest of his free-born days—how
the last words she wrote—The more I trust you,
the more you let me down—became the one
note he could never choose to give up.
"BIERSTADT'S LAST BUFFALO, 1888" — SPILLWAY, SUMMER 2017
Soon, he will be forgotten—
he knows this
because he revels
in the colors of awe—ultramarine,
lush vermillion,
because his bigness has gone out of style,
because he bristles
every canvas with luminescence.
So his last was less theatrical:
See the buffalo—bearded, stout,
low to the ground,
dying with arrows in his back—
each a long, sharp stroke,
and the crowned horns shimmering.
And the Comanche advances,
feathered spear aloft—
bringing a new aesthetic
to the shadowed river valley.
His band’s oncoming wave—dusty,
savage-bright, manifest.
Both opposite radical sleep.
The white horse rears over
vivid skulls glistening like pearls!
Maybe Bierstadt wished to live on
in his vast blue sky—carnal,
revelatory, marbled with clouds—
never ceasing in a single painting.
I can see him sitting down, sketching it out,
closing the eye of the buffalo
and elk, raising the cry
of the forlorn Native, and far off
in time, the buzzards—little angelic wisps
from those blue prisms—
coming to chew sleep again into light.
"HELM" — TERRAIN, MAY 2018
"LIFTED" — NEW ORLEANS REVIEW, 2018
"FISHING THE CADDO" — RUMINATE, WINTER 2019
We never owned a boat, but we dreamed
of boats when we dipped our hands
in the river. My father taught me to stand,
to gaze into water. On the banks
we waited for something, but it wasn’t a boat.
We knew that it went into the water,
that it would come out, that the black Nissan
truck drove hard, snarled on the route.
Dad flipped his wrist, taught me to throw
a little tooth with invisible line
to invisible water, that it could grow weight.
The spears we held gave us a language
we wrote in the air. As we sat, Dad pulled
worms from dirt, fit them to the hook.
If you set it right, he said, there is no pain—
not for the worm, not for the fish.
When I stuck my fist in the whiskery cage,
the crickets sang my skin alive.
And still we waited—what we pulled
from the river was the river—liquid muscle,
speckled with our fingertips. Some fish
transfigured in the sunlight. We held them
as long as we could before giving them back.
"ABSTRACTED STOOD" — RHINO, APRIL 2020
“and for the time remained stupidly good” - Paradise Lost, Book IX
Always a pause before the dazzle
after the brink, a blank.
The thing that awes you, stuns you,
plants the wow in your mouth.
Always the space before what comes,
departs. The line is where
you sign your name. Threshold,
your choice. The fruit
you juice—what curls your tongue.
Say what you saw, saw what you can
right down through the eye
of the wood, the pith of the trunk.
But it’s lost as soon as you find
the beauty of beauty’s invisible
bridges. Call it the wind
that hides you, the breeze
that forgives. Call it the sky blue
sky that proceeds, finishes
through feeling, hinge of
the marvelous—what opens
what closes. Call it the woman’s face—
the one you love or the one
you hardly know, that leaves you
dumbstruck, stupid-good
before what happens next.
"HOW WE BREATHE" — 12 MILE REVIEW, SPRING 2022
Dandelions blaze small fires in spring.
My son wanders the yard to discover
one after another. I hold the bloom
burnt up to a little white ball and blow
the feathered seeds—the fuzzy parachutes
catch, swing soft missiles through the wind
to leave them in the ivy. I imagine how
a germ spreads in silence to meet our
fingers, lips, our eyes. How we breathe—
And my son sees not the seed, the germ,
but the beauty of the drift. For such
motion, he will seek out each square inch
of green, ask in his stumbling English if
we can Do it again. And to fan his wonder,
all I can say is Here, over here.