By Ryan M.
Small Opera
It’s easier to find the video than to describe
the scene. I’ve got no gold to farm, but history
is always flagellation and indulgences,
weeping old women on church steps, burned
garlic, rats and beards. Synagogues by torchlight
and now I’ve got the nerve to be
at frayed edges over insignificant shit. What might
an obese watcher in a lorgnette
have to say? Our singers skinny and our spotlights
golden. Better dress small complaints
in big scenery like:
Beneath the chap-fallen steeple go the cars,
full buses, taxis and some chain link scars
the former plaza of the sculpture garden.
I note in passing a rusted penny farthing.
Except, not.
Sophie, remind me to stop at Whole Foods;
I told your mom I’d get her cereal.
There are some smarts that through our dim selves move,
but I’m two little kids
in a costume, tottering Chewbacca. Even as my heroes
I’d have plastic pecs.
Calcium Carbonate
I am always elegizing, out of fear,
something not yet gone,
singing the slow-song
though it’s only intermission.
Like a falling bit of tinsel-
tape, spinning and turning as it falls
we’re dark, then sparkle, then we’re dark
again, in- and- out of
the spotlights’ giving.
Any city safe
behind the borders of an airport
is suddenly the best city,
and the one in whose sewer’s exhale
my shoes move, be it
Bethlehem, or Atlantis
is just the tumbled upward leavings,
reef-like, of the pictures it corrected,
the rough-hand, in red-pen
scrawling like a divorced
English teacher (this is it?)
all over your ‘Traffic imagery
in The Great Gatsby: Wait for
the Green Light.’
What’s he doing now? You swore
you wouldn’t go down
like your teachers or your father.
The soft things that built
the reefs of this world,
and the sphinx, are dead. They’ve left
their ‘afterword’s
a house of bone and riddles.
Electronic Music
If every hip’s arc and fist’s pump
is a debt to grief
then all the quiet among us
is just the inverse
of what we can’t afford to say.
In the baselines
and breakdowns, the cold casings
of our sound-shrouded
hours are the seeds, short
though their roots
reach, of all the speech
this climate denies us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan M recently graduated from the writing program at UC Santa Barbara, and has published short stories in journals and university magazines including Spectrum, Mused, The Dirty Napkin, and NY Big City Lit. He is currently working on a novel and probably spending too much time at coffee shops. He can be reached via email at words.words77(at)gmail(dot)com.
