May 07, 2018
Monologue to the Moon
About Austin Sanchez-Moran
Austin Sanchez-Moran received his MFA in Poetry from George Mason University. His poems and short fiction have been published or are forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, Denver Quarterly, and Salamander Magazine, among many others. Also, he had a poem chosen for the anthology, Best New Poets of the Midwest (2017).
“Poems are bullshit unless they are/teeth or trees or lemons piled/on a step.”
- Amiri Baraka
Tonight, I can only answer you in large portions.
Do we still need a sitcom laugh track in a world of missing persons?
They said it was a good time for lilac, for plumbing, for urban plight.
This is how I’ll separate day from night.
I noticed a dead wasp in the sun on the windowsill.
Just the urge to drink the morning’s mercury makes me ill.
My Buick puked again in reticent Connecticut, sitting sappy under a tree.
Engine endorphins, a well-oiled, steely gland fantasy.
How come the tides don’t bother me?
Are we sure you are the goddess we want?
I can be a tightly packed revolutionary!
I can squeeze lemon into the sea urchin’s orifice,
as he struggles to draw with a gull’s tail feather!
My mother was a manta ray, shelf life electric!
My father could play the blues if he was a tuna fish sandwich!
Attorneys are sleepily marching back from you, milk jug in hand.
And gold-toothed, sweater-vested investors are only drinking
the wine that has hints of a wet dog’s neck.
This report is brought to you from a lion’s claw-foot bathtub
in shining sand, wet with your perspiration.
Austin Sanchez-Moran received his MFA in Poetry from George Mason University. His poems and short fiction have been published or are forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, Denver Quarterly, and Salamander Magazine, among many others. Also, he had a poem chosen for the anthology, Best New Poets of the Midwest (2017).