We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

EXCLUSIONS

by Noah Falck

/
1.
POEM EXCLUDING MODERN TECHNOLOGY You fill the pool with cough syrup, and the hot tub with a thousand hollowed-out cicada shells. A man becomes the state bird in the riflescope of a child, and the trees, the trees remember themselves as seedlings. A teenager mistakes his shadow for an old friend. Together they think the unthinkable. You climb a tree and grow your hair shoulder length. We are almost too young.
2.
Everyone we know with brown hair blonde hair black hair and strawberries in their mouths on the floor of a silent house in the suburbs. Everyone we know with a goatee a mohawk a head shaved as a symbol of surrender. Life is what it feels like when you say, it was good to see you again. With shifting weather patterns, and children constantly gravitating toward the monkey bars to start another subculture. The sky moves over them like a bodyguard in a low budget film. Everyone we know gives us a look that says, I'll tell you later.
3.
POEM EXCLUDING TAXES On this day in history the moon died of natural causes. Astronauts were unavailable for comment. Though there was an eerie white silence in all the rabbit-shaped clouds. To comfort you, I read a bedtime story where everything died of natural causes. It began: On this day in history the moon died of natural causes, though we still dreamed it was full. You shrunk beneath the sheets with the most German of smiles.
4.
POEM EXCLUDING FUTURE Now the snow is black and we feel dirty in its presence. Cigarette butts blow across the wet pavement like children leaving school during a bomb threat. There’s a good chance we have no chance is what your thoughts are during your daily commute to the office. Roads break apart as variations of sadness. And now the sky is all truffles and shoe polish. It rehearses the end over a cemetery full of children trapped in moonlight.
5.
POEM EXCLUDING CITY The sky was a concussion of clouds and notorious for dropping everything at a moment’s notice. And the fog, how it removed everything and then it didn’t. People gathered in the distance and made history until it hurt. They devoured field after field with bad ideas and took pride in the groomed ruins. It was never a photo opportunity. The mood when the forest met the asphalt: Too little, too late.

about

A selection of poems from the book EXCLUSIONS (Tupelo Press, 2020).
Available for purchase at www.tupelopress.org/product/exclusions/
or anywhere books are sold.

credits

released August 1, 2020

poems by Noah Falck || www.noahfalck.org
sound recording & mixing by Benjamin Jura || juraaudiohouse.com
cover art by Blick || misterblick.free.fr

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Noah Falck Buffalo, New York

Noah Falck is the author of EXCLUSIONS and SNOWMEN LOSING WEIGHT as well as several chapbooks including YOU ARE IN NEARLY EVERY FUTURE.

contact / help

Contact Noah Falck

Streaming and
Download help

Report this album or account

If you like Noah Falck, you may also like: