Christopher Salerno
Scary
What are the patterns that distinguish us from ghosts?
I tan.
You rock
back and forth.
Our lease is nearly up.
This is a season, too.
We touch the grass, play a toy piano rooted in the mud,
our heads back as if swallowing bells.
A cloud arrives, opens and then closes.
I am ready to not see the light.
Like my Polish uncle
cursing in Polish.
It’s what we bring to silence.
*
Do you think death’s effect is
of entering, or being entered? Like waking but
at the wrong hour?
When the world was flat that didn’t happen.
People slept all the time. They thought the world was wider. Thought that words
set to music would take refuge in music. Not be like bottle rockets
or fast growing trees.
With some in the end there is a farewell
act of awareness. A smile, a robin’s egg
returned gently to its nest
in the satellite dish.
This explains the feather in my grandfather’s death hat.
I once asked him
about the size of the world.
Are you wanting to possess it, he asked?
No, but I anthropomorphize
animals in landscapes. See in the trees expectant
parent- squirrels returning
to their nests at night
finally invisible.
*
My brother over
the phone asks me if
I’m sitting down. I stand. Remember how he
in a park broke another
boy’s arm by snapping his elbow up.
That boy sat down.
Now I am standing. Language begins.
I sit back down. A flag
with two heights.
Do you think it (death) is supposed to come as a surprise?
Like the moon claiming you?
I can hear
men hammering on a nearby roof
today. Some tree-fruit sways overhead
like a traffic light. Lord,
stop me.
What I started to say. About urging
the ill to come forward,
try to die.
Christopher Salerno's most recent book of poems, ATM, was selected by D.A. Powell for the 2013 Georgetown Review Poetry Prize. Previous books include Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, 2010), and Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006). He is also the author of the chapbooks AORTA and Automatic Teller, winner of the 2013 Laurel Review Midwest Chapbook Prize. A 2014 New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellow, Salerno's poems have been published in numerous magazines, including Academy of American Poets Series, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Denver Quarterly, American Letters and Commentary, Verse Daily, Mississippi Review. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at William Paterson University where he manages the journal, Map Literary.
Return to September 2015 Edition
What are the patterns that distinguish us from ghosts?
I tan.
You rock
back and forth.
Our lease is nearly up.
This is a season, too.
We touch the grass, play a toy piano rooted in the mud,
our heads back as if swallowing bells.
A cloud arrives, opens and then closes.
I am ready to not see the light.
Like my Polish uncle
cursing in Polish.
It’s what we bring to silence.
*
Do you think death’s effect is
of entering, or being entered? Like waking but
at the wrong hour?
When the world was flat that didn’t happen.
People slept all the time. They thought the world was wider. Thought that words
set to music would take refuge in music. Not be like bottle rockets
or fast growing trees.
With some in the end there is a farewell
act of awareness. A smile, a robin’s egg
returned gently to its nest
in the satellite dish.
This explains the feather in my grandfather’s death hat.
I once asked him
about the size of the world.
Are you wanting to possess it, he asked?
No, but I anthropomorphize
animals in landscapes. See in the trees expectant
parent- squirrels returning
to their nests at night
finally invisible.
*
My brother over
the phone asks me if
I’m sitting down. I stand. Remember how he
in a park broke another
boy’s arm by snapping his elbow up.
That boy sat down.
Now I am standing. Language begins.
I sit back down. A flag
with two heights.
Do you think it (death) is supposed to come as a surprise?
Like the moon claiming you?
I can hear
men hammering on a nearby roof
today. Some tree-fruit sways overhead
like a traffic light. Lord,
stop me.
What I started to say. About urging
the ill to come forward,
try to die.
Christopher Salerno's most recent book of poems, ATM, was selected by D.A. Powell for the 2013 Georgetown Review Poetry Prize. Previous books include Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, 2010), and Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006). He is also the author of the chapbooks AORTA and Automatic Teller, winner of the 2013 Laurel Review Midwest Chapbook Prize. A 2014 New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellow, Salerno's poems have been published in numerous magazines, including Academy of American Poets Series, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Denver Quarterly, American Letters and Commentary, Verse Daily, Mississippi Review. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at William Paterson University where he manages the journal, Map Literary.
Return to September 2015 Edition