johnny masiulewicz |
|
| |
|
Johnny Masiulewicz is author of the poetry collections Keywords: a dada experiment (Happy Tapir Press) and Professional Cemetery (Puddin’head Press). His work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies including Curbside Review, Letter eX, Third Wednesday, Nerve Cowboy and The Alembic. A native Chicagoan, he now lives and works in Florida.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
I called her my angel. she
said she could sprout wings,
turned her back. beneath a
thin gray tshirt sinews and
tendons writhed, adjusted.
delts, lats shifted in sine
waves of elong/contract til
the infrastructure of her
back slowly lifted her scap-
shirt sprouted angel wings
she relaxed the contortion,
released shoulder blades to
their fasciae, said, when
|
|
| |
|
Bell's Inequality (Chaos Theory? Ha!) |
|
| |
|
all is connections. chambered
thenon, a cassette tape — all
Major and neap-suns are framed
by pre-bronze-age megaliths
visited the World's Fair. a
I'd read Fair history and
matchsticks? veinations of a
delineate quintrants: five,
seven, five, seven, seven
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
I wish we caught a crayfish. We turned over enough rocks, fished through the debris below the dam, got hands wet in the dirty Des Plaines River water.
I would have chased you across the park, wielding the wide-open claws like twin mini-vises. You’d flee through puddles. I’d follow into the slough surrounding the swings and we’d wade to the knees til the old man of the trees would emerge howling, typhus water! typhus water!
We would take the crayfish high on the riverbank, protecting it from the swooping gulls and petrels as we sat by a campfire I built. When it got dark you’d want more light. I’d stoke the fire, tell how olden sailors would impale stormy petrels on poles and light their oily plumage for torches. You’d say, get a bird net.
In flickering campfire shadows you’d walk along a dune, stand against the sky, cast a dark penumbra over us, over all this. In such dire silhouette you became the stormy petrel, to those olden sailors the dread harbinger of discord, the onset of peril.
We failed to catch a crayfish, found only one broken sun-bleached claw, the reek of fish-water, a metric ton of rusted cans. You turned, walked away wending a new path across the filthy stones.
For the dam has long been moved, the river now runs in different ways. Deltas are destroyed, islands emerge, water dirties over time, and all the familiar paths we used to walk together have been rotted and washed away.
|
|
|