A fervent traveler, or, as he’s badged himself: pilgrim, located presently in Boston, Massachusetts. Scott is drawn to authors of the late 19 th – early 20 th centuries, favorites including Kafka, Fitzgerald, Camus, and Genet. He writes from the standpoint of a soul wedged betwixt moony backpacks and stony shoulders, right cheek shamefully smashed against the subway door’s glass. Wings tangled like sheets in the turnstile. Sleek pupils balled-up like crows, swallowing, swallowing, like philosophers, like murderers in their cold, threadbarren winter trees. Scott’s poems are the pudding of moans, yearnings, weanings, myths, renunciations, remonstrances, and vain valedictions.

Cormorants

The long cannibal mouths of summer done.

The hot fruit eaten.

Viridian bikinis cold,

resentfully

unlidding like scabs.

This is the time of Testaments,

numb boners and nickel-tinted tits

no more yellow yellow licks.

Worms unfurling into torturous doilies.

Crows settling into urns.

The branches are

rigor-mortis screams.

Oh, love, are you chilled and lonely?

Take this shawl, this long pendant fingernail

to curl about your neck.

It is dead, grey, and truthful.

The snow falls gelid and sloppy as old sperm.

A deluge of abortions eating your feet

your knees, white bunnies

with bloody unplugged bellies.

You want to vomit.

To run.

To cry to God.

It must be a dream,

a dream. The sky is tumbling in

like a great pachyderm

feline,

sated and sleepy.

Taboo

A gray skate lurks under all dresses quick and pretty.

A still

circling sea.

At center

rivets infinity,

pin-sharp

flagpole

topped by a god,

by a fly, a gaffed

wiggling seal.

He laughs madly in his

pointy silver hat.

My languor toils against window glass.

Eyelash-stilettos softly razoring,

dragging

sad anchors. I feel wan

relations at sunset:

worm of the rose

of damask jam, slinking

décolleté—from cracks, from cracks—

Chanel death-scents, minty mellowing apricots, vaporing

whiffs, hot cold spikes

sweet sweet mama-spice,

paned

against this thin diamond ratio,

this queer lust against

life, flat

cellophane fish-eye.

Will it be rapturous?

Or slack release, the fly thudding.