Nighthawk
Try as I may, try as I might,
halve this wish, bend oblique,
in tact, alight. Perched, the
murders of lampblack bust
in the foreground. Shadows
snip the narrows behind me,
valleys gallow below
in pernicious expanse. Eyes
blank, without atom, flanked
by turgid memory. In profile
I am more massive, marble
blue, vague ode to a windless
plain, to the banality
of contemplation, due
diligence, to you, my cryptic
apnea.
Gregg Murray is an
assistant professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College. His most recent
poems can be read in Horse Less Review,
[PANK], Ayris, and Word For/ Word.
Please visit his website for more information, including links to other published
poems, essays, reviews, and scholarship.
PORGI, AMOR
Weather permitting I fold myself
into you and other shapes.
I put my face
on the menu, muscles
over the fire, and it’s a good feeling
to know my life is
over your head.
Now you’re behind the lens
poking through
like a breathing
sometime crisis,
a note of pure threat
in reverse, and these are the facts
as you need them.
The birds clump up.
Your corners form
point by threatening point
and it gives me a terrible idea.
It calls for wading
into the sun,
eccentric see-sawing,
rubbing my teeth on screen.
It puts this huge question
right in front of us,
which is just what we’ve been
screaming about, the plunge,
the panting corridor
full to bursting with
gravity and
ruined conversation.
This way I can’t know the future
and won’t grow into it.
This way I let my feelings live
somewhere across town
and let a whole year go by.
They say the inanimate life is wild
and shiver-inducing.
Well it starts this afternoon.
A dream. A micro-economy
of cigarettes.
I could have lived respectably,
making a big wax doll
and kissing it,
but now I don’t remember how.
It is the day after Christmas
inside the boiling hood of a car
and I am not to be unhappy.
I am come from the city
of the brain child.
I think I may be in love.
Michael Joseph Walsh currently lives in Fairfax, VA and is the poetry editor for Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art. His work is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Fence, and PANK.
