I WRITE because the cemetery marble keeps shifting. Every morning it’s farther away; every evening I slide home from work and look over my shoulder and listen, but the voices in the bodies it conceals have no stories left. I write because they’ve left me alone, and the living on Fourth Street, the girls who silvered their hair last summer, the boys so weary to be loved they no longer trust the rise of sound in blood and lung. Because an old man in the market stoops to know the cost of flour, the weight his bones might hold some winter night like this one, some notion he conceals of sea or Gethsemane fractured. All along the south of Spil Mountain we saw wildflowers pierce the snow; we kissed each other’s throats and must do so again. Its cost is language, the virulent and joy thereof, the impostor I’ve become—a thief of olives and a thief of evening.
ESCAPADES In New York City, the girls make scarlet hearts where their mouths should be and wrap cinctures to skinny their waists and enlarge their evenings. I walk President Street past Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, and wait for the rain, for a moment wishing our burdens were the same, our visions and fears. The A-line takes me to a crowd of concrete faces, and the girls don’t follow, having risen to meet dark men on East 45th, darker men down the blocks with playing cards pasted to their hats, each surreptitious, each, not me. I order a beer at Barney’s and go to the men’s room, adjust my jeans, and ask where mercy is here, in the city that disregards us, and the little boy who plays the violin, expecting quarters and the stray crust of a pastrami sandwich, a baseball card, a fortune. I circle: Wall Street sings, pink at night with snow-clouds, pink my eventual sleep in a room in which the heat pipes clatter, in which the sound of country music keeps me pasted to the window, watching the girls who haven’t returned. Friday continues— a hard forever—and the taxi drivers watch the weather open-palmed.
WHELK LINES A storm blew miles of whelk ashore, so many horns you would’ve thought both sea and earth were made of them. That morning I learned to dance, fitfully at first, but then my feet began to move in ways that never belonged to me. Sadie leaned against the pier, seeking the forgotten in my new-found zags, my flesh gelatinous saltwater tinfoil and a somehow long denied me. We didn’t kiss that day—we wouldn’t kiss again because of our separateness seemed better against the density
of life below us. I’d grown impossible limbs then wept because the air and life thereafter were still, impossibly still, like the air declaring in a churchyard, two people had wed, and the remaining: dragonflies and wilted flowers: afterthoughts.
Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.
