you can love a thousand lonelinesses, no need for monogamy, you are limitless you can love the razor and the scale, that third bottle of vodka. you can love the night of karaoke with friends when you’re the only one sober as well as loving your bathtub as you sit in it alone on a friday night, starkly pale and small you can love the first kiss’s fists curled up […]
Walking outside. You move through galaxies. Stars flowering during mid-day hours. These small white blossoms pool, clustering around. As mingling of mosaics. Broken— pieced together without any impulse to pattern: Athena becomes the sea, becoming folds of night, foaming darkness of your hair pulled back from your eyes. Believe me, reluctant muse, even with silence, the mere action of you holding a reed of this plant to your lover represents […]
His voice: a train in the distance. Grackle–call. Rusty screen door. Smoke-filled memory. I dream of him wearing a coat of flames, blue-tipped divine fire burning, a holy roller, or perhaps as something other, a saint Christopher set on the car’s dash, even though the prayers sent out to him became redacted retroactively— along the Mississippi blue deltas I shift his form to the gift of poems from another country, […]
Somewhere a mother Keeps on wishing For the touch of Her estranged son While somewhere he Keeps on wondering Why he can’t find A woman he loves While somewhere the girl He abandoned Keeps on hoping he’ll Want her back While somewhere a song Finds its ending Only to start Once again Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most […]
malls and theatres were once less shocking filled with plainclothes strangers self-moving, staying within themselves a long sit on this bench, watching brings them out of plainclothes a platinum blonde stops at a store window looks at her reflection, opens a small purse takes out a lipstick holds it at arm’s length pulls its cover off, out leaps a two-foot butane flame the tip of which she applies briefly to […]
The donkey sets off unbalanced from the weight of an adolescent ride, Jamie you are more than just a teenage crush I would have you on your hands in buckets of jam on our picnic by the beach when it does not stop raining from rudeness you say the wind walks like a crab in my hair or a shadow picked apart. you say you like the waves their curves, […]
a table is set in the middle of an image of the high plains. clouds white and clouds purpling sit at the wide horizon. low roll of timpani. the table is covered in white billowing in wind caught like the hem of a dress caught like hair unpinned. there are grasses in hummocks clear to the heavy sky. on the table a heavy candelabra black weighs down the shroud white […]
The trail to the beach is rough and gun-grey. The shore itself is mostly rocks with the occasional small patch of sand. The weather is cold. The waves are incessant. But the ocean is the perfect stand-in for the past, for all that is impossible for me to wrap my head, my arms around. That’s why I walk down from the cottage. That’s why I find a resting place and […]
Sam grinned at me from the obituary page — windswept hair, golf shirt, framed in summer leaves. Born and died in Oklahoma City like the smiling grocer, Ruby Ellen, boxed next to him in the newspaper, strands of pearls and corsage on red. James Louis collected coins. Poppy loved the lake house. Brian fought in Vietnam, and Coach left his players on the field. According to the obituary, […]
Leo didn’t want much for the work, but offered the keyboard that lay doused in cellar dust— same shit had wrecked his lungs a lifetime and now caused this clogged, syncopated samba to come from the place his voice box should be—he packed it up, wheezed, Good Night, Ahl, and was gone for good. I call him every day to finish the work, mend the pipe still leaking—no answer, till […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 