How We Make Art

Dexter Booth

I spent the morning painting

cardboard trees. Jagged spears

that did not lay well

under the mouth of scissors.

I mangled the beer box

until there was only a forest of rockets

and bombs displaying alcohol

labels under thin films of acrylic.

The horizon is sharp and angled

now. I’ve planted corrugated pine in the living room.

At sunset they look like search light cones,

mini drag beams from an army of UFO abductions,

tepees made of flayed alien skin, anything

but your eyes

returning to point and say what you see is a formation of lights,

growing dull now that you’ve been

probed and abandoned

in the dark woodlands of memory.