THEY HAD FUCKED ONCE, BUT NOW
—their tongues were ossified, throats sewn
into stone sarcophagi, cemented shut
with recollection’s sour glue.
Untold, how could their story change,
unfold itself from underthings
and bottlenecks. They ran
their faces through the repertoire
of flexes: smile, nod, and squint
against the sudden dark, the unhelpful
haze of streetlights flickering
alive. Before the moon could hit
the antennae-fields and smokestack-groves,
they had run dry of words. Unrolled,
the blackened ends of that night they’d shared
seem dead, or nearly so: ashes fragile
with the lingering smells of August and surrender,
that holiness of unknowing.
Fusebox
An incandescent flash
of powder in the brain-pan:
a single spark, a flick
of switches down the row,
rails shift,
protein gears engage and swivel—
sodium-gates and chlorine-locks
unbar the flood of hungry ions
held without—
(a blossom on the ink-well,
a broken lantern bleeding oil
black and burning on the wave)
—the sudden turn
of the electric tide, a rising
swell of ions twitching,
spiked across the lipid walls
by the pounding surf of voltage:
coil of compression pounded
through a cortical maze, whirling
columns, cream and ivory, pearly
nodes, and the alabaster trench—
(a slather of light, magnetic
summer-drench of spinal sap,
a storm-swell piled high and crackling)
a dendrite tapestry, a cityscape
where towers arch and bend
at the cradling waist, touch filament-tongues
to the algorithm tide bearing in the dead:
cowrie shells, stony
wings and feather-tomes, child-kings
aborted in the millisecond
that lapsed from nerve to trembling pen.
As If I Too
Yet another autumn storm scrambling texts and sending
pigeons tumbling, cooing in the cornices, and shitting out
of fear upon the huddled overcoats and brims. Yet
another caterpillar crawl between the black umbrellas,
muddied soles that squish and mutter through a matted
carpet of debris: soggy papers, neckless bottles, shards
of egg-shell, cardboard signs and cigarette nubs, rags
that may, upon examination, smell of gasoline and weed,
pepper spray and Molotovs. I twitch a hand as if to grab
a sodden mass of cloth, imagine that by sniffing at the after-
math, I too could be there in the thick, the smoke, the ragged
chant and angry cheer, the blood from where batons broke
flesh beneath the sputtering orange lamps and mirrored banks
of windows. Yet another night of wondering, from the safety
of the now, if I could riot like the rest, if I could let the fury rise
above the fear the way I lift my shoe yet one more time to step
across the skew of shattered glass, torn t-shirts turned half
to ash. Yet another night of fingering these fragile bones.
Yosef Rosen is completing his MFA in poetry at Bowling Green State University, & serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for Mid-American Review. His poems are published in Slipstream, The Chariton Review, & Blue Monday Review, & forthcoming in Common Ground Review. He cannot help but giggle at the word “doilies.”
Cover Photo: Ffion Atkinson (https://www.flickr.com/photos/neonfear/) (Altered: cropped and edited vibrance)