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Samuel LaRive

December 2019 - January 2020


The Blue Hours

Collection of Poems By Samuel LaRive
Blue Boy
A blue baby
boy nearly
Breaks his mother with the birth.
A lazy looming,
double moon
Lingers above the hospital room.
Baba’s babes off the coast
Boast that they know the most.
There is the child,
Yellow and mild.
Barely born, and wild.

Apophenia
I fell for
The brush of hair,
To reveal the thinnest chain.
With an empty stare
And how quick a smile fades.
Then it ended as it began;
Just as easy,
With a head turn.

The Blue Hour
Why did everyone’s dog die the same year
Ain’t it clear
The sound crushing fear

I mourn that season lost
The winter I couldn’t get across
How cold it really felt

Oh this coat is too thin
Under the sunset subtle skin
Oh who the hell let you in

Without asking

For Chadron,
From the island of Nebraska
When I see you,
All I can think of is food and fire.

From the tops of your yellow butter hills
That drip oil into cast iron black roads.

It spills from the pan, soaking into the grass and chewing tobacco
Feeding those sausage finger trees.

This is a well-fed, meaty forest, of cows and food processors.
A thin river of thick gravy bisects the overflow of land.

Meanwhile, a cigar car nearly cleans the sidewalk,
And the accident reeks of barbeque.

Somewhere a burning belly of Busch Light
Bellows itself out into the night.

Tips from the poet’s muse (a love letter slipped under the door)
Don’t you dare
compare me
To a sunrise. Or
A sunset.
Or to flowers from the garden,
In bloom or wasting away.
Don’t say I’m the snow
Or the rain. I don’t match any kind
of color. Please don’t dream of me crying.
Or, wonder where I wander.
Just
Don’t call me baby, just
Don’t call me at all.

October 2019


​The Sounds Les Boeufs (Tatanka) Make If You Get Way Too Close

Samuel LaRive
Oh! Can’t you tell he’s from South Dakota?
A big stick and bull balls!
That voice that echoes through the open land.

Oh! Can’t you tell she’s from South Dakota?
A mighty mythical baby makin marvel!
Fed on a steady diet of the American past and
the American pasque.

Their songs, so sweet, plays regularly on local
stations--
Their love, so near, brings the river’s radical
currents--
Their child, tall and trustworthy like a flower fed
from the irrigation ditch--


I’ve seen gravestones by dirt roads
And smelled the sweet grass. I know
The ringing heat in the fragile air.
Black birds above, making circles like
Skid mark donuts in a Shopko parking lot.


To say any more of that lonesome prairie love,
With a passion like water to the burger cows.
To speak the rumors and good gossip of
Dances at dusk, downed in denim.
Could stop the whole of the prairie’s mighty
ocean!


That second-hand truck got stuck
Between a fatality marker and a speed limit sign.
They both ask me questions I can’t answer.
So, when the car won’t start, and the seats rip
apart.
I’ll think of riding little horses.

Cutting Through a Tangerine

Samuel LaRive
My knife ran through their body like Citrus
butter
The juice, loose inside that thin skin peel,
Separated itself at my command.
Like an Orchestra’s conductor conquering the
band,
I took each piece in my terrible hands
And ate them one after the other.

Each slice, the lips of new love
Kissed quietly in a public place.
Pulp on the fingertips, so envious
of this fruit. The truth is:
Finish what has already started.

Born In 99

Samuel LaRive
The members of the flannel brigade
Placed a bomb on the motorcade
Fueled by vodka Gatorade
Another part of the punk parade

And a group of the camo clan
Who the state so harshly banned
From their promised land
So they sent in their best men

And the pink cops in uniforms
Drove up and burned down the dorms
The snitch they listened to was misinformed
He was just trying to buy what his paycheck could not
afford


Then those bureaucrats
With barbed-wire bats
Took off their well-tailored hats
And asked—if we could spare some change
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