a n t h o n y    o p a l

 
 

Sonnet


Sonnet








































Sonnet
 

alas saying Yes Yes this is a good
painting my dynamic crumpled horn is
run into the ground even as my slow
body is covered in a flannel shirt
and that’s not all my wife too touches my
body when I am sick and also when
I am not I feel her nipples where my
fingers meet and become palms with which
I cup a handful of her hair and let it
fall down against her back like sunlight
felled by an axe on the cool bed in the
afternoon I return to my painting
with Yes scrolled across the bottom of it
in magenta (the opposite of habit)

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Sonnet
 

hello skirmish of bright red fire ants you
nervous bird-herd not of the sky jackfruit
printed tie and the library leaning back
heavy with ivy below the crisscross jet streams
of an empty Doritos bag floating by
with such whimsy that it breaks me into thirds
a kind of doxology before this
alter of fire or maybe these streamers
as your voice is a bottle rocket
to me and to everything else simply
a dog whistle (unbearable unhearable)
on the outskirts of campus the prophet waits
scribbling notes about the baby foxes
born just beyond the threshold of the gate

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ANTHONY OPAL lives near Chicago and edits The Economy. His work has appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. To read more, visit www.anthonyopal.com.

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