Benjamin Goldberg
Moonwreck
We dove beneath the first pier shore lights refused to touch
and lit its pylons with our kisses.
Darkness manhandled the Atlantic into music,
the rims of the inlet like accordion bellows
as moonlight broke over the cliffs.
A song of ruptured bulkheads
unsheathed sharks from their reefs and shadow-
rusted wreckages, cast shoreward
waves inlaid with the sea’s reddest memories.
Our hands padded helixes
through the black sheets’ star-pox.
On our backs we hauled the moon’s rippled children
and sloshed over sandbars for places to gasp
the briny wind. Each cloud was a pillar of god
waiting to crumble. Thirst was our direction.
Our lips, still, our light.
Epithalamium
I can’t say I need less
than to wear your shoulders over mine,
than russet barn door and sweat-
stained flannel at dusk.
When you drag your bow
across fiddle strings, bliss limps down
my spine on its fingertips.
My skin is the whisper of leaves
on fire. When what I want
is the scent of wood smoke
and the silence crickets mean,
your songs unhinge rooms in me―
my beams swell with the sound
of them napping there. At night,
our bed is an insomniac’s map.
I’ll frame each noise you make
for a stairway gallery.
Pluck floods from me each night
until I die. After, on our porch
we’ll eat cake the shade of forest.
We’ll drink nothing without sky.
Benjamin Goldberg’s poems have appeared or are forthcoing in Best New Poets 2014, TriQuarterly, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Greensboro Review, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. He is the recent recipient of an award from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and was a finalist for the 2014 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest, the 2013 Third Coast Poetry Prize, the 2013 New Millennium Writings Award for Poetry, and the 2012 Gearhart Poetry Prize. He lives with his wife outside Washington, D.C., and currently attends the MFA program at Johns Hopkins University. Find him online at www.benrgold.com
Return to November 2014 Edition
We dove beneath the first pier shore lights refused to touch
and lit its pylons with our kisses.
Darkness manhandled the Atlantic into music,
the rims of the inlet like accordion bellows
as moonlight broke over the cliffs.
A song of ruptured bulkheads
unsheathed sharks from their reefs and shadow-
rusted wreckages, cast shoreward
waves inlaid with the sea’s reddest memories.
Our hands padded helixes
through the black sheets’ star-pox.
On our backs we hauled the moon’s rippled children
and sloshed over sandbars for places to gasp
the briny wind. Each cloud was a pillar of god
waiting to crumble. Thirst was our direction.
Our lips, still, our light.
Epithalamium
I can’t say I need less
than to wear your shoulders over mine,
than russet barn door and sweat-
stained flannel at dusk.
When you drag your bow
across fiddle strings, bliss limps down
my spine on its fingertips.
My skin is the whisper of leaves
on fire. When what I want
is the scent of wood smoke
and the silence crickets mean,
your songs unhinge rooms in me―
my beams swell with the sound
of them napping there. At night,
our bed is an insomniac’s map.
I’ll frame each noise you make
for a stairway gallery.
Pluck floods from me each night
until I die. After, on our porch
we’ll eat cake the shade of forest.
We’ll drink nothing without sky.
Benjamin Goldberg’s poems have appeared or are forthcoing in Best New Poets 2014, TriQuarterly, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Greensboro Review, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. He is the recent recipient of an award from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and was a finalist for the 2014 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest, the 2013 Third Coast Poetry Prize, the 2013 New Millennium Writings Award for Poetry, and the 2012 Gearhart Poetry Prize. He lives with his wife outside Washington, D.C., and currently attends the MFA program at Johns Hopkins University. Find him online at www.benrgold.com
Return to November 2014 Edition
