|
UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY - 02/2012
|
|
STEVE LONGFELLOW The Appointment A quiet little man sits in a lobby waiting for a door to open, for someone to come out, to offer him something-- what, doesn’t matter-- and because it is a nice day, the door that he’d already opened, he’d left ajar. But now he sees in fragments, frame upon frame--a red shoe lifting, gone--a bird’s hard eye piercing, past--within a basket the head of a child-- And all the time light insisting on a shadow, a still-life of traffic runs over again and again, and there is no witness-- no not a hint of where the body is--skin after skin, after skin. St. Ives Elegy It’s a gray day and, outside the galleries and shoppes, people rub against the air, erasing themselves away in this town of angles where every direction is up unless you are walking down to the sea quietly waiting. * Two pints down, and I’m undressing people passing by the pub window and, though I don’t see monkeys, I do see aborigines just like me, not to mention odd shapes that turn back the clock-- angel on a hook, knees spread slightly, within fire’s ash, the skull’s lantern. * The music turns from 60’s retro --Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Elvis-- to disco for the women out, mothers and daughters. Offered on a table, in a plastic bassinet, lies a newborn; the air throbs. The infant gazes upward, open; a grandmother smiles down, looms over, her pale face, her glittering eyes, her stiff, black hair, spread wings. Steve Longfellow's poetry has appeared in Drunken Boat, Los Angeles Review, Pif, and Summerset Review, among others. Poems will be out soon in Word Riot's10th anniversary anthology, Foundling Review, and RHINO. His poem, “Vaudeville,” which appeared in the In Posse Review, was nominated for Best of the Web. |
|
© 2004-2012 Underground Voices |
|
|