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I listen to its tuned sounds crack in the dark against a pillow near the Post and the heavy Army blanket static and pretend the pine trees are still standing in the yard where sunlight flowed into a gut hollow, and then there is the picture of the silver cat on a shoulder named after yours melting into the picture of the black and white face of the mannequin staring down and to the left as is proper from the insides of an international magazine and that used to be practiced for fun in the den on the wine dark carpet by the owner of that face, to my horror, the slug still lost in the bedroom ceiling, the supplies still canned and filmed with greasy dust in the cupboard, short parades in the dark, the jar there where roaches bred their ticking hisses. Look at me, the mouth said and then death had a face with warm clear skin that I would find with my almost yelling but not quite by then loving mouth, almost yelling by then but not quite yelling, Stop that, as if there were any stopping that and as if my tongue could stop it. |
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No light was meant to touch a beating heart. Do not, don’t, Doctor, press your fingers to my throat. That is the color of his flanks as he hurls and hauls his body up the hill from the water, blackly brindle-striped. His teeth stream the river, his tongue slaps air with pink silent laughter. Here is the clear stone held to the lamp, the bronchial tree of the ant. |
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THEODORE WOROZBYT has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Alabama and Georgia Arts Councils. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, New England Review, Po&sie, Sentence, Shenandoah, The Southern Review and Quarterly West. He has published two books of poetry, The Dauber Wings (Dream Horse Press, 2006) and Letters of Transit, which won the 2007 Juniper Prize (The University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). He is Assistant Professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College. |
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