The 1920s
Brandon Downing

posted Feb 9, 2005

…You want muscles? Look at a frog.
All I get from exercise is this need,
So I drive toward deep voices…

Look:
A group of mustachioed, athletic boys of the
College harmonize along the middle range; humping
A car that looks, oddly enough, like the head of a dog.
Little below me but the veranda that tops
The bank building—it's smooth, but it
Rotates around…and I hate Jenny Brown.

I want to go: my skin
Feels like the color of that old roof.
My testicles feel like driving goggles. / Stand up.
It's what ads for woods looked like
In the 1930's-1940's. Where the sun does
Appear more than four feet across.
But the sun is foul, it's on fire.

"Mommy,
Did the car also go to the reservoir?"
It went with the woman. Stenographers
Wore furs, and drew stegosauruses
At their desks, and were quite still: "Mud!"

*GHOST STORY (1981)

Brandon Downing is originally from San Francisco, where he was co-founder and director of Blue Books, a non-profit literary bookstore and performance space in that city's Mission District. Since 2000 he has lived in New York, where he works as an exhibit designer and researcher and spends many weeks on planes. A photographer, collagist, and sometime filmmaker, as well as a poet, his books include The Shirt Weapon (Germ Monographs, 2002) and the soon-to-be-released Dark Brandon (Faux Press, 2005).