Paul McCormick in Tarpaulin Sky

PAUL McCORMICK

from WORD : WORD

EELGRASS AVATAR Pumensis adaliah L 7 1/2” (19 cm)

Often foot-found. Highly variable four-year avatar with incomplete ponti. (Not to be confused with Person Of No Tactical Importance.) Adults west of Squaw Island arrive without index after first frost. “Westers” paler than cerulean grid morphs. Subspecies on Unqua Point, P. a. gilbroughmens, is manholed. Third-winter avatars, striking in their breeding dermatoform, terrace gazebo plinths. Compare also to third-winter Hermit Avatar. Second-winterers’ ears are steepled, forested. Reverse knees mucked before afterglow. First-winter avatars uniformly draw water, poverty, cloud, death. Song is a single, buzzy overtone delivered from refuse, headstones, or in high-hovering above oars. White morphs may ventriloquize. Calls include a dry flicking of the thumb. Range: Subdial. Faintly atop domes, towers.

WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING BEST DESCRIBES THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BUZZY OVERTONE AND A DRY FLICKING OF THE THUMB?

A. You are a good swimmer, vole, a better Minoan than he who opens the hardware store at dawn. How the night comes to this. Your cold body velodrome.

B. What the palinode retracts flowers the orchard. A wiffleball curves toward the bay. Harbor meerschaum, harbor lust.

C. Religion came down the bird’s-eye view. Came down the flashing. The bluestone. My pock-marked knee. I reach in deep for the idle adjustment. Honey, we’re out of beer.

D. In your model (mono), dispersal is phenotypic and clonal. In my model (nucleosis), the strike zone is just above the sea.

ALTHOUGH PROGRAMMERS CONFUSED THE BIRD FOR THEIR EARLIER __________, THE WIND GESTURED AS IF NO PRINT HAD LEFT THE SAND.

A. asceticism, and the uncanny ability to locate a nearby parts car (1951 Studebaker) thereby compensating for the loss of autumn beneath their mothers’ feet

B. Wichita

C. model of the poem, a decoy touched to transom raising hunters from the grass

D. lookout, a buoyant perusal maintaining jeans were dungarees whether one worked packing bullet-proof vests for the conflagrants of a former proxy or lugged blocks of granite for the local quarry

IN SILENT FILM, THE CHITINOUS RAISE THEIR SONG, A THOUSAND __________ STACKED BENEATH THE MEMORY OF
A __________.

A. ............................................................................................................................
..........paralogists nodding “okay” across the creek. What you see is what you net......
.....................white lego deli, red pencil wife

B. .................................................................................................................................
..........citronella webbings........................................................................................
.....................Stuttgart cadenza

C. ............................................................................................................................
..........cards fell from his spokes that had drawn the path’s narrowing cathedral a
yellow “no horses” and the south built gray in spheres.........................................
.....................glasphalt climb. “Soon” he thought “the derailleurs would lose their
teeth and discard our need for wool.” Put on your silver suit, we’re coming down

D. ............................................................................................................................
..........join-me-to-my-darkling-lefts, join-me-to-my-darkling-rights, but the
understory’s plain to see and I keep pedaling by. Two cousins...............................
.....................tiered and aggregate cinder. The bedwetter dreamt of math

Paul McCormick’s recent work appears or is forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, Verse, Fence, Conduit, Barrow Street, Word for/Word, and DIAGRAM.