Julian Talamantez Brolaski
Winter 2022 Edition / Poetry
Three Poems
Julian Talamantez Brolaski
flock of stars
should I be a shepherd,
eyeing my flock of stars?
riding backward on the train
thru unromantic newark to
a garden in new york where I’d
meet my friends, poets, the ones
who knew what nectar
tasted like. and once they had taken
the nectar into their bodys well
others began to seek them out
longing for that sweetness
on their tongue. they leaned against
a wall of flowers and wore caps emblazoned
w/ a single blue rose. bees swirled
lazily but purposefully about.
I am accurate to my surrounds, they sang.
I can swim in a drop of dew
I can make a flower spurt
from my finger.
rock in a snowball
jelly in a donut
I heard a revelator say there’s gold
in the head of the bear.
and my aspect is all simplistic.
to the poets who never stopped rhyming
in my honeyed state
love’s tercets formed
perpetually
a self-willed meadow where deer
would play
happiness, happenstance,
the alchemization of loneliness
into sweet my birds, sweet my saplings
seekers of a bygone solitude
where the river bends
flowed I
where the spittle and
the broken leaves float by
& colored shadows shimmer
uneven portrait of the stolid trees
yet one more compelling cuz
I could dive into it
w/ my cap uplifted to the sun
I knew I should
have silked some beams
before I’m done
rangers bussing in the grass
w/ darting tongues &
heaving hearts
to the poets who never stopped rhyming
do I dedicate my arts
Julian Talamantez Brolaski (it / its / itself) is poet and country singer, the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011). With Juan & the Pines, they released an EP Glittering Forest in 2019; their first full-length solo album is coming out in 2023. Julian is the recipient of the 2020 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry and a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellowship. Its poetry was recently included in When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat 2020).