SETH GRAVES // Texas Tommy San Francisco

Texas Tommy San Francisco
(based on the dance)

I didn’t use the                        Turkey Trot
Or Texas Tommy in Thalia, Barbara on Barbary.
All I saw glissando             HEAVY LIQUID
Come from the ground fire, trench scream

San Francisco murder
At the turn of years
Bur we’re making our      HELL NEW
In the Fairmont Hotel now, fire gone

Fire now our own, “the dance that
makes the whole 
              world stare”
She wants me gone                    she wants
She wants me to stay                 she wants

examination of the relations
borrowed from a mutilating badge scene
think kick hop but dead by cop
two more for good measure and a little sax sex

put it in a faux newspaper, grizzly bear
I’m blending foot and some drink
and it doesn’t cut my hands
Sid Brown on the stand

take it to lost town and kill someone
I am blooming an entirely
new body out of my slide             slide 
glass of oil                 shoe ashes

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Seth Graves is Associate Editor of Coldfront Magazine (coldfrontmag.com). His poems have appeared in H_NGM_N; Barrow Street; No, Dear; La Fovea; and elsewhere. He teaches and lives in New York City.