Arian Katsimbras
Of Stone and Glass
Tomorrow the wind
will fold me sideways
into my desk. Tomorrow
I will break into a fever
of counting: forty-two
homes outside my window,
two dozen hotel pen caps,
a paper, envelope, my name
twice written on it―
one in cursive, the other
a series of mirrors
above it―, a picture
of a girl and I blooming
the corners of our mouths.
Tomorrow I will begin
to guess a violent kind
of guessing, like naming
what’s empty, while I
imagine that she is now
older, that she’s now
somewhere up sidewalk
or street or ribboned inside
herself a little further back
in the dogmouth hills of our
oncehood; her dry heave
of breath, thirsting.
As kids we would kiss
in those hills our fathers
worked. They aged, forgot
to bury themselves. We
kissed, forgot ourselves
into ourselves, forgot
the sound of our lips, stone
against glass, a break of tooth
against tooth. Us, wrapped
hard in each others’ fists. Now,
I too, older, think memory
is the color of thinking.
I think of her chest, mine,
cleaved to halves, opened
on hinges, heaved wide
into the air of a history
we mistook. I think lost.
I think of mouth and mouth
and that if I listen close
enough I might hear
them bang together, break
like bone cages, break
like stone, like window.
Arian Katsimbras is from Reno, Nevada. he currently live in Blacksburg, Virginia where he is an MFA candidate in poetry at Virginia Tech, and where he also serves as Poetry Editor for the minnesota review. There are no casinos there. Sometimes he plays bones.
Return to November 2013 Edition
Tomorrow the wind
will fold me sideways
into my desk. Tomorrow
I will break into a fever
of counting: forty-two
homes outside my window,
two dozen hotel pen caps,
a paper, envelope, my name
twice written on it―
one in cursive, the other
a series of mirrors
above it―, a picture
of a girl and I blooming
the corners of our mouths.
Tomorrow I will begin
to guess a violent kind
of guessing, like naming
what’s empty, while I
imagine that she is now
older, that she’s now
somewhere up sidewalk
or street or ribboned inside
herself a little further back
in the dogmouth hills of our
oncehood; her dry heave
of breath, thirsting.
As kids we would kiss
in those hills our fathers
worked. They aged, forgot
to bury themselves. We
kissed, forgot ourselves
into ourselves, forgot
the sound of our lips, stone
against glass, a break of tooth
against tooth. Us, wrapped
hard in each others’ fists. Now,
I too, older, think memory
is the color of thinking.
I think of her chest, mine,
cleaved to halves, opened
on hinges, heaved wide
into the air of a history
we mistook. I think lost.
I think of mouth and mouth
and that if I listen close
enough I might hear
them bang together, break
like bone cages, break
like stone, like window.
Arian Katsimbras is from Reno, Nevada. he currently live in Blacksburg, Virginia where he is an MFA candidate in poetry at Virginia Tech, and where he also serves as Poetry Editor for the minnesota review. There are no casinos there. Sometimes he plays bones.
Return to November 2013 Edition