Jean Meyer Aloe Poetry Prize from The Academy of American Poets
Penumbral Floaters
Afternoon, January
It’s winter again and I cannot bear the heat
of ancient radiators. By scented candlelight I sweat over fresh tax forms
sent me by a business now foreclosed. There’s a present absence – a blank Rosetta’s stone that leaves me guessing at the shape of numerals.
The top floor of an office building peaks
above the other side of our yard and I choose to notice
bird formations ripple through the shitty glass on their way southwards to an air-conditioned room and perennial coconuts.
Personal history gathers on the living room shelf
in objects, like winter’s own wasps, a buzzing threat for quiet hours.
A birthday card from the parents of our former roommate yellowed like the Magna Carta stands folded by the Lego set we built before the year-long night.
The plastic man invites onto his jet.
I heard you roll a joint with Stefanie between the curtains of my sleepless gloom.
That was last night, or yet another night. The Timeless gathers
for its own migration into ebbing, humming blue, the color of my eyes at two years old. Mom sent me that photo yesterday.
I will put it and the others in the blue folder with my W2.
Plague
Paint, in so many words, the color of flesh:
They must have had a word for it, in the stinking years
when beak-nosed men quelled silence in the rot-thatched alleys: A body, mold-grown in the heat, a corpse of brimming blue.
At the stroke of an hour, I visit the unnamed.
Coffin-lined, a memory looks whole. I might have choked on flies 800 years ago, before we knew the cure. Nothing can mend
your flapping presence, bat-like in the ill-lit yard.
Or else, think closer, to a recent moat: Where did they go, the crippled faggot gods? Begot in cracked linoleum and left
to breed their doom. Skin so thin their royalty shines through.
Their curse rebounds on us: we choke on lonesome ghosts in latex smoke.
A frayed phone cable patterns our conversations on remembering touch: Scarved skin, angular pressure, an unmasked aperture.
Your whispers draw a map of goosebumps, a shiver in the dimming rain. The shapeless hangs like hooked ham on my curtain rod. I’m blue.
I spend Saturday silencing my wants: devoid of your attention, I
forget your number kiss dying men breed forth a nascent plague and wonder at the hollow milling grain, encircling my gut.
Your absent gumption might have solved the shame, symmetrical.
How do we fill empty rooms? With air, with sculpted air.
We count the deaths in numbered breaths and wonder at their spell. Ever drawn to cream curtains, for their hotel neutrality, we forge ahead:
wipe down your destiny with sanitation products left by the prodigal maid. Then, hope.
When touch resumes, it’s whole and light and warm. I look at the flowers lining our avenue and note to you that they smell like before.
There, under them, in the soil of sprinting years, our flesh becomes them well. A passing plague, and past it, just the blue: a regal, renal hue.
Climbing
What is the world but round?
I think little of other possibilities.
I am now a boy, younger than grown, Fond of climbing the oak or chestnut In my grandfather’s yard, to see, rapt,
The far curve of the horizon, lapping at the light.
Mother says I remind her of herself.
What use is that to me, knowing both parties involved? But I egg her on with my smile, bowing to the forces That bestow ownership on youth. What a little dance, My life. We spin under the Perseids, yearly.
That is how I know my age.
Mother spends her days alone. She writes
And is unhappy to do it. We live in my grandfather’s house. She is his only child. I am her only child.
Were I to draw a family tree, it would be a line. Though I may want to, I cannot climb linear trees. When I try, their sap stains me with ink.
In the boughs of the grandfather tree, I spy
A dolphin carved mid-battement into the gables Of the main house. It reminds me of swimming, Which I never learn. How strange I can picture it, The stroke and the plunge. Though I never learn, I learn. Such is my haunted mind.
At night, the stars flutter like fireflies. I catch A cold in March when I sleep under them.
I can nest in a tree like a sparrow, and hatch Thoughts in springtime. Mother calls me in.
I dream of swimming in the sky, and climbing Constellations. Waking is falling.
When I am ten, I fall and break my arm. Except it does not break, it sprains.
What isn’t whole is broken, grandfather says. When he dies, his body is burned into little flakes. I see them drifting, from my perch, and wonder If anything is whole at all.