Thrush Poetry Journal
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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 




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