Graphite Pencil
I'll sketch the dread of limitless night. The graphs:
rising prices against the rising dead.
Draw you a swan curve that skates along
the arc between singing and satirizing from a balcony.
Cross out the hate on social media,
make Facebook an erasure poem - one on the right,
one on the left. Even through this daylight and birdsong,
I'm a star sparkling eyes fixated north,
east, on the oncoming trail of a meteor.
Facetime me from where a voiceless loved one
rests and on their brow I'll capture the fracture of our
age, the symphonic apex of our isolated
cries: wash your hands, stay safe.
Wielding but this tool against the unknown, I'll sketch
out a trip among friends to celebrate the nebulous
After - shading in our tentative future.
I'll sketch the dread of limitless night. The graphs:
rising prices against the rising dead.
Draw you a swan curve that skates along
the arc between singing and satirizing from a balcony.
Cross out the hate on social media,
make Facebook an erasure poem - one on the right,
one on the left. Even through this daylight and birdsong,
I'm a star sparkling eyes fixated north,
east, on the oncoming trail of a meteor.
Facetime me from where a voiceless loved one
rests and on their brow I'll capture the fracture of our
age, the symphonic apex of our isolated
cries: wash your hands, stay safe.
Wielding but this tool against the unknown, I'll sketch
out a trip among friends to celebrate the nebulous
After - shading in our tentative future.
When you leave here,
turn off the blinking buttons,
give away your dear ones - colatura
that doesn't please him, weights he
will never lift. Banish the old clothes
you bought to make him happy.
Deliberate again and again and again
until 5:30 am sun dazzled you beat your head
against the derelict bathroom where you once
sang opera and washed clothes in a 5 liter
washing tub.
Shed possessions like a cat denudes
his winter fur, strewing piles of indecision.
You populate the porch with an estate sale
of your old life, for vultures to come peck at
these funereal remains.
By then, you will have become
a memory fleeting through the DIA airport
and riding the tram with the corny music
for the last time; you slip through the gate,
daunted, a footstep on the moon.
turn off the blinking buttons,
give away your dear ones - colatura
that doesn't please him, weights he
will never lift. Banish the old clothes
you bought to make him happy.
Deliberate again and again and again
until 5:30 am sun dazzled you beat your head
against the derelict bathroom where you once
sang opera and washed clothes in a 5 liter
washing tub.
Shed possessions like a cat denudes
his winter fur, strewing piles of indecision.
You populate the porch with an estate sale
of your old life, for vultures to come peck at
these funereal remains.
By then, you will have become
a memory fleeting through the DIA airport
and riding the tram with the corny music
for the last time; you slip through the gate,
daunted, a footstep on the moon.
Maria S. Picone has an MFA from Goddard College. She’s interested in cultural issues, identity, and memory. As a Korean adoptee in an Italian American family and a New Englander, her obsessions with noodles, seafood, and the ocean are hardly her fault. Her poetry appears in Homestead Review, Ariel Chart, Headline Poetry, and Route 7 Review. Her Twitter is @mspicone, and her website is mariaspicone.com.