UNDERGROUND VOICES MAGAZINE/BRETT MILLER


	UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY

BRETT MILLER

231

I know where my mother keeps it,
but the logic of where it rests,
and why it rests there
is like the sonic prayer
of a drowning dolphin.
A young soft widow,
pale and red cheeked,
slow and significant,
rocking like a careless child
towards its own impression
into the clay bottom of the immortal sea.
The echo of her memory
denied
by those who pay
no heed to the sallow keys of a D minor burial.
Those who disrupt the silent melody
warily placed on the last crumbling leaf of autumn.
Ignoring the light-fingered melancholy touching our ears like religion
right before sleep.

I think about the famous vomit
that stained the hotel floors of The Chelsea—
That some of it could have been mine,
in some way.
That we are all part of some large ghost—
All laughing and howling and puking at the exact same time.
The imprints of our faces littered across the unconscious—
Coming to be in a puddle of old rain water,
in the bark of millennium trees,
the dizzy violet end of a wild root,
in the language of tumbled stones,
a gust of lightning across a bourbon meadow,
beneath old sweaters
in the bottom drawer of an intricately whittled coffin,
captured in the bones of an undeveloped photograph.
Our memories spread like a
thick venomous fog over a graveyard at 2:31 am.