On The Other Side of the Dirt
The seasons have sabotaged us once again. What is left of the good? I wanted to defang growing old but the party has already crashed. I sanitize my heart and smile for the cameras never pointed at me. Living is a hobby I was never good at. Everything feels new in the dawn of this tender rage. Sweating out the cold of a frozen past, burning the bridges leading to a lost future. Call me in the morning. Call me in the always. Call me everything. I morning glory my far away. I’m balancing the line between deja vu and devotion. I want to flutter in the belief of feathers again. You can only keep uncertainty buried for so long. I want to breathe through this mouthful of failure.
Less Magic
Oh, I quit the sun too. I gave up on lullabies and fireplaces and sunflowers and galleries and vegetables and messages found between pages between books between dusty shelves between towns waiting for ghosts waiting for whatever comes next. I started a sweater drive so I could remember how to feel a feeling. I want to wrap the world up in wool. The sky has overdosed on transparent. I turn everything cellophane and fall asleep dreaming gossamer. There is a drought inside and out. Ask the soil. Ask the mother of all our children. There are stones wishing for more magic for more sparks to be seen by the eyes of poets rubbing them together with words. Everything is in layaway even the casket. There are too many skeptics and not enough human aquariums. This is the birthday party of a memory I forgot to forget. This is a deck of cards that lost its meaning, a magic trick that didn't come with an instructional manual.
Anhvu Buchanan is the author of The Disordered (sunnyoutside press) and Backhanded Compliments & Other Ways to Say I Love You (Works on Paper Press ) and Which Way To Go or Here (Platypus Press, 2016) co-written with Brent Piller. He currently teaches in San Francisco and can be found online at www.anhvubuchanan.com.
Brent Piller is the co-author (along with Anhvu Buchanan) of the mini-chapbook Which Way to Go or Here (Platypus Press, 2016). His poems have appeared recently in or forthcoming in (b)OINK, Gramma, Wildness, Reservoir, and Yellow Chair Review. He can be reached at brent.piller@gmail.com.
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