Wrapped around the steel wire of your
Frame, the stain of Chardonnay, four
Four bottles that bent the room, and
Turned us out and the purple plume, hand
Over hand, four in hand, crooked knot
That pulls my seams in line but not
In sync, they’re jumbled scattered skittered
And the ice drip that bloomed from our
Limbs, limbing, limping, like cherries bittered
In the jars of liquor my dad kept on the satin wood
Assembled with His hands and stood
To hold the fruits above the head
In the memory of rooms I once said
Were my own, my home, a stone of a place
I keep in my jacket pocket
And feel the weight, iron locket
Tugging the cloth from my chest
To separate, peel back the past, what’s left
Behind is the Now, but I’m not in this
Moment, am I, thoughts vaporing, kettle hiss
And you say you’re sorry for the stain
You left on the shirt, like there’s a shame
In it, but there’s none, lover, friend
Because the redness brings me back
To those cherries, in their jars,
And for a moment I can
Occupy the ghost of those rooms again
Category: Uncategorized
St. Marks and 1st, 2:42 a.m.
Raise plow
It’s a sign I see
Every time I’m drunk and passing
Through St. Marks
And I try to picture the snow mounting,
The ice expanding into the vacant cracks and
Smothering the already narrow throat
Of a street choking on its history
I’m one of the atoms spread thin over this street
Where Giants have howled to rebel moons
And forty years ago you could smell the revolution
In the sweat and thick clouds
Of smokes and songs
Coalescing into a snow of itself
That lined the streets in heavy piles
Raise your plow
You, machine
And leave it be
To the shapeless murmurings
And scattered thoughts of who I was
Just a year ago
When I was whole
And though I wasn’t always happy
I was happy
Because when I try to fathom where I’d be forty years ago
It strikes me,
A pillar of furnace flamed steel,
That my small murmurs are all the street of my throat of my skull has room for
So carry on, machine
Raise the plow
Andromeda
It doesn’t scare me to read that the world is ending
It will not be my children
Or my children’s children’s children
That will see the collapse
2.5 million light years away,
Andromeda, you are the closest galaxy to my own
I’m the Milky Way,
And though we can’t feel it,
But I swear I can,
There is a pull between us and
In 4 billion years
We will collide
We have collided before
In the beginning
When all of matter was thrust together in
Beautiful chaos
And our elements slow danced
Before the great fission,
The concussive Bang,
And we scattered
Now we are not one body
But two
I’m not afraid of the imminent collision,
Though they say it will be the end of ends
Of our world
Because it comforts me
To know that across these soundless
Black distances
We reach out with unseen fingers
And though they don’t interlock,
My fingertips hover beside your own
And I smile to think that
Though we move
As independent bodies in space,
There are unseen contours
In the fabric of space itself
That tug on our bodies
And pull them together
I don’t fear the collision,
The merging of galaxies
Because I can feel the heat of your distant stars
And they give me warmth
In this cold darkness
And I wait eagerly
And patiently
For the day that our hovering fingers
Collide again
Gas Leak, 2015
Beloved son
When the thunder struck did
The sound wave reach your ear
Restless particles
Oscillating against the
Body of matter and gravity
Or was it all silence
Siren screeches
They whisper the walls down
And the smoke licks out from the rubble
And I saw it
First on my phone
Before rushing out of my apartment in the ABC’s
Sprinted to 7th and 2nd
To see the the circus
I double-knotted the laces of my
[Optical white Chuck Taylor’s, 49.99 -2% student discount, eligible for FREE Two-Day shipping]
And in that whiteness I first saw sun
But in the smoked chimney 7th street
The mirage was unsustainable and the
White became abyss to me
And the helicopter blades severed the air
Into sinusoidal hands that tugged at my shirt
And stuttering sound emissions
That shook the flames
Flames that stretched like cat spines
Reaching upward towards the sky
Tadasana, mountain pose of smoke
Fingers of rippling heated air curling up in prayer and pushing
The last structures down into the Earth and
A plume of grey ash bloomed out in every direction
And suddenly you could see into the windows of the adjacent apartment building
Like peeling back the bark from the stalk and
Revealing the cellular structures within the walls
And the whiteness captured them, the starers standing in their windows
Their view of brick and mortar replaced by the trickle of siren lights and shimmering reflections through the smoke
And they stood there, naked and in awe
Looking out at a sudden emptiness
A new angle of space within the familiar cross street
And the city looking back at them
In mutual surprise and understanding
And I felt a sudden shame at looking in at the intimacy of the moment
And turned away and noticed that my
White shoes had turned grey
Two Bears
Staring up at the vacuum, sometimes
It’s easy to forget that the bodies
We occupy,
Are the teeth of a gear,
Spinning in clockwork and
Moving another body
I try to see myself sometimes
In the the constellation Orion,
Hand bonded bow drawn,
Taut silver strand of otherworldly tension
He is all potential energy
Eyes pulled forward, right hand pulled back
The moment before
The hunt
The flash of a bolt
Locked onto the future,
Orion, destroyer
For him, forward motion is everything and
I like to imagine that his bow seeks
Ursa Minor
Above him,
Even though I see myself more in
The Little Bear, than I do in Orion
I’m no destroyer
But I am Minor,
Dwarfed by the vastness of endless planes
Humbled by the supposition that
I’m a tooth
On a gear
Terrified of the consequences of my movement
That when I spin, you
My Ursa Major
Spin also,
For we are both teeth
On gears
Turning each other, round and round in
Great circles
You are Ursa Major and I am Ursa Minor
Though I am small beside you
I am happy to be a part of your movement
Happy to be both contributor and recipient of your
Great circles
But I am still small
And Orion hunts me
Matt Cavagnero 