Unpublished Poems by Broc Rossell

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But I don’t know but a book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf – at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel – you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety – & even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.

Herman Melville

Susie, what shall I do – there is’nt room enough; not half enough, to hold what I was going to say. Wont you tell the man who makes sheets of paper, that I hav’nt the slightest respect for him!

Emily Dickenson

I am the outskirts of a nonexistent town, a prolix commentary on an unwritten book. I am no one, no one. I don’t know how to feel, how to think, how to love. I am a character in an unwritten novel, passing by, airy and unmade, without having existed, amid the dreams of whoever it is who didn’t know how to complete me.

Bernardo Soares to Fernando Pessoa

You can’t derange, or re-arrange,
your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)
The words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.

Elizabeth Bishop

Review from decomP

Broc Rossell is from California. He teaches poetry writing, literature, and philosophy in the English and Humanities departments at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. This is his first chapbook. The poems from this collection appeared in Colorado Review, Harvard Review, Memorious Magazine’s blog, and Volt.

SANS MAISONNÉE

The end of this poem
Is beyond me
And in this discursion
You have joined yourselves
To an old certainty:

We love each other.
Fruits swell on branches
Out of the white blossoms of your
Freckled countries

While bats flow
Into the bright failure of themselves,
Wings beating echoes
Of this poem’s lines
The tip of my tongue is tracing
On a winter windowpane.

In a new stanza
We are pared down
To the throat bone’s thrumming;
We’re in an octave people can’t sing.

VESTIGIAL

When you fell into your feet
The torso tied off
And the night crept into another small country of grief

I walked from room to room
Flipping switches

Taking things from drawers
And bringing cups into the kitchen

Like a tree whittled down
To the handle of a bucket

Whittled by the wind over the gray green sea
That prunes each of these afternoons

Cleaned, then cooked
Down to something almost useful

Though you are no longer here to see
What remains of me
When I’m paying for this whole apartment