mineral lit mag
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    • Issue 4.1
    • Issue 4.2
    • Still Standing
  • Home
  • About/Submissions
  • Masthead
  • Featured Poets Series
    • 3 poems by Chris Prewitt
    • 3 poems by Taylor Byas
    • 3 Poems by David Hanlon
    • 3 poems by Bailey Grey
    • 2 Poems by Seán Griffin
    • 1 Poem by Jarrett Moseley
    • 3 Poems by Hannah Cajandig-Taylor
  • Issues
    • Issue 1
    • Issue 1.5: Hozier-inspired
    • Issue 2
    • Issue 3: Recovery
    • Issue 3.5: Lana Del Rey
    • Special Summer Solstice Prose Issue
    • Issue 4.1
    • Issue 4.2
    • Still Standing
Returning to the Nihilism of My Youth, I Become Untethered From All Victory
 

 At the end of a very long book I cried
out of nowhere. The ocean below
continued debating. I fell asleep in the
blue light and then I awoke in the
blue light, the very long book still on
my lap. I ran at a speed of one second
per second into the future. Nothing
unifies me with the wounded spirit, its
high call to remonstrative action.
When I lift my hand in the direction of
fear it’s nakedly in the hope it might
be kissed. I told all these things to
the man sitting next to me as he slept,
in the blue light by the very long book.

There’s a creek in my veins that, when
It opens, spills naked salt water up the IV
Tubing to the idiot future we are making
Right now. Death is a too-big tunic I
 
Forgot to return so now I have to keep it
In the back of my closet for a long time.
The usually-loud guitar string is quiet.
I am shaking its legs so that they don’t
 
Turn blue. I keep reading Noelle Kocot
Because it’s important to assemble
A little bouquet of necessary poetries for
Surviving this time. That’s right, it’s still
 
Right now and we are no closer to being
Able to pull off that tunic, no closer to
Restringing, or even retuning, returning,
Crawling right into the center of the sun.


Tom Snarsky teaches mathematics at Malden High School in Malden, Massachusetts, USA. He is the author of Threshold, a chapbook of poems from Another New Calligraphy, and Recent Starred Trash, forthcoming from marlskarx. He lives in Chelsea, MA with his wife Kristi and their three cats: Niles, Daphne, and Asparagus.
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