Two Sonnets

i.

The blinking lights looked like sirens of cop cars,
yet were Christmas lights.
Vision was a dream,
and yet the row of shops look like reliquaries tonight.
Community is metaphysical
yet in a circle you place a US dollar into my hand.
The cyclist was a bastard
yet let dangle a jacket of animal skin.
Revision is a reel rolled past a film we arrived too late to see,
yet the square footage it takes to build a gallery
sign says CAMPING NOT ALLOWED HERE.
It takes a tongue of fire to lick
a fire. Swallows in
the mold, yet.

ii.

Like dead leaves like wrappers on the surface of a pond.
Beside a yard of run-of-the-mill fennel weed.
By the pile of bricks we spoke of scars in the back of your car.
Writing, an excuse, some days, to fail to speak to you.
The saddened powers, etc.
I, a song and dance man.
Alone at the mountain’s foot.
Alone at the feet of clay.
Life anteriorizes the living.
Like my insides are outsides and my outsides, outsides too.
My name was not the form not even the look.
Beside you in a queue, like a book,
where such namelessnesses meet.
Outside the Bank of America, I wept.

Jos Charles is author of the poetry collections a Year & other poems (Milkweed Editions, 2022), feeld, a Pulitzer-finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series selected by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions, 2018), and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press, 2016). She currently teaches Creative Writing as a visiting assistant professor at UC Riverside and as part of Randolph College's low-residency MFA program. Charles has an MFA from the University of Arizona. She resides in Long Beach, CA.