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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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ZACHARY C. BUSH
The Stillness Holds No Promises A love poem Back when I was just a quarter of a decimal I rounded off to the steepest crowns of Now Before I watched Past tear apart too easily Like a diseased patch of silver-dusted skin I can hear the mechanical echoes of my own laughter Intended for Something somewhere where I am Sweating it out in the corner of a noise-crowded Waiting room of a dirty Lower East Side AIDS clinic That smells like a blending of dog shit and Big Macs And I’m distracted with my perverse prayers for Positive Even though that’s not what the nurse ends up giving me As a form of compensation for all the hours I sacrificed Being the lazy eye inside your favorite glass marble “Anima, actualized” Tonight is like your last night’s view of my body from behind Curled-up and naked inside your open window pane The sweat-shine on my skin reflecting the Technicolor City’s glow As I savor the final burn from another Gitane with the filter ripped off You exhale the softest of laughs and gently finger My shoulder’s pool of blended light and by now All of our awkwardness has since been addressed With one long descriptive open-ended question That’s been patiently answered not once but twice Earlier tonight I knew I had been turned into a shrimp named Selí Swimming against the strong currents of complex zigzag patterns And ricocheting off the high-pitch of crisscrossing echoes But now that I’m lost in the layers of unfamiliar texture Now that I’m lost in the absence of familiar physical markers I ask myself is this not just another high-definition dream? Or Is this what it feels like to be marinated in your sweet-ginger West Coast taste? From below I hear echoes echoing more echoes All these echoes are circling me from every angle Like tiny callused newborn fingers raking over blue Candy bars covered in Braille-print plastic Wrapping scratches ascend to a deafening-white Pitch that is gnawing through my flesh as I lay On my back trying to gasp the deepest of breaths While the crinkle-crackle-crackle cracklings bleat their collective cry A thousand candy wrappers explode into a magnificent chemical red Zachary C. Bush is 24. His first full-length collection of experimental poetry, at swan decapitation, is forthcoming through Louis E. Bourgeois's VOX Press. He lives outside of New York City with Veruca Salt, his bipolar cat. |
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© 2008 Underground Voices |
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