From a telescope from the ward
For Johnny in Ogden, Utah
The Summer morning rose through the earth
like hallucination, my mother the shade of strawberry-milk
and skull, humming new names for God
as I enter the world—all that gale force—I had
found that the wailing tendrils of victims are timbered
and sticky, understood that giving
thanks was to sit in silence
In the howl of her mind she squeezed
my head like a peach, the remainder of her life;
now a fiction. She drank cranberry mixers all through
her pregnancy, and now feeling disemboweled
she’d funnel rivers of juice until her body
was spring-fed and her eyes were crystalline pools.
She crossed out my name on my birth certificate
and wrote something else.
During our Winter parties I fantasized in mouths
of liquored yawns, bodies collided like mist,
small-waisted mothers placed down half-finished drinks
I’d drain secretly at twilight, licking the cylindrical rim
to understand the history of their tongues,
to let my feet ascend from this planet
It wasn’t until the nightshift when I was helium,
floating towards fluorescents, concealing track marks
with an old cast, when I desperately tried out ideas of love
on customers with programmed phrases, learning
foreign meanings to try to capture little drops of light
to burn through past lives, like falling icicles
turning into streams of perfect confluence.
By Zack Stein
Zack Stein lives and writes in NYC. His work can be seen in the upcoming issues of Dunes Review and Riggwelter Press, and was most recently featured in the Matador Review, (b)OINK, The San Pedro River Review, and others.
Work for Monthly Verse is selected through our editorial process. New poems are selected from authors that submitted work for the last issue. Read more authors by subscribing to Fjords.