All the Errors by Kathleen Fellows

All the Errors by Kathleen Fellows

My clothes are completely full of mistakes

but not the ones Sean’s always pointing out

as if sewing the correct sides together

could make matters magically better.

Few weeks on the job and she’s already

hip deep in late payments from the client,

sending emails about changing their mind

as to whether they pull friends together

or wear something different or nothing.

You think that is not at all poetry,

try this: that client still hasn’t paid me.

It’s been about a month of mind changing

and they still do not have the down payment.

A friend had recommended them to me

and now I would be happier with none.

I should go back to making for myself

and just get a normal job like everyone.

It’s too much pressure to please people for

the same cost they could get it at some shop

online that’s based in China or Taiwan

that will be a much lower quality

but people still expect the same price, which

means no money to be made for me here.

I should be good because they hired me,

my unprofessional, much in debt, self.

But it is always hard not to complain,

especially with a writing option

right in front of me with someone leading,

someone with a full imagination

full of metaphors he thinks no one likes.

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Selected Recent and New Errors by Dean Young

My books are full of mistakes

but not the ones Tony’s always pointing out

as if correct spelling is what could stop the conveyor belt

the new kid caught his arm in.

Three weeks on the job and he’s already six hundred

legal pages, lawyers haggling in an office

with an ignored view of the river

pretending to be asleep, pretending

to have insight into its muddy self.

You think that’s a fucked-up, drawn-out metaphor,

try this: if you feel you’re writhing like a worm

in a bottle of tequila, you don’t know

it’s the quickness of its death that reveals

the quality of the product, its proof.

I don’t know what I’m talking about either.

Do you think the dictionary ever says to itself

I’ve got these words that mean completely

different things inside myself

and it’s tearing me apart?

My errors are even bigger than that.

You start taking down the walls of your house,

sooner or later it’ll collapse

but not before you can walk around

with your eyes closed, rolled backwards

and staring straight into the amygdala’s meatlocker

and your own damn self hanging there.

Do that for awhile and it’s easier to delight  

in snow that lasts about twenty minutes

longer than a life held together

by the twisted silver baling wire

of deception and stealth.

But I ain’t confessing nothing.

On mornings when I hope you forget my name,

I walk through the high wet weeds

that don’t have names either.

I do not remember the word dew.

I do not remember what I told you

with your ear in my teeth.

Further and further into the weeds.

We have absolutely no proof

god isn’t an insect

rubbing her hind legs together to sing.

Or boring into us like a yellow jacket

into a fallen, overripe pear.

Or an assassin bug squatting over us,

shoving a proboscis right through

our breast plate then sipping.

How wonderful our poisons don’t kill her.