Like An Animal Cut Roughly in Half
When person A splits from B, silence bleeds into the room.
Clock hands inch towards then away from the sky.
Furniture holds its claw feet to the carpet.
Even the mind holds a center of gravity:
somewhere to reach for, to dig & dig deeper.
Until mounds of red earth spring up.
Until the hole takes on groundwater, echoing a well.
Soon a fresh city emerges, a system of pipes, a boatload
of sex shops, people starting over.
They swipe onto trains. They flood parks with kids.
They strip down a kitchen, put in an island.
First appeared in Pleiades.
Ben Purkert's poems appear in Agni, Boston Review, Fence, Kenyon Review, Narrative, The New Yorker, Ploughshares and elsewhere. His first manuscript was a finalist for the Field Poetry Prize and Brittingham Prize. He is one of the founders of CityShelf, an initiative to support indie bookstores.
No comments:
Post a Comment