He took two trains
to get to this repopulated bistro
Through paragraphs rising
in hopelessly rectilinear slums
where the smell of cooking
friction dominates throughout
The meal structures
their disappointment
The grits look disinfected
and the béchamel gives off
a prepositional scent
of warranties and weak acids
He asks how she is
and she mouths okay
with the finality
in a misspelled epitaph
He’s fairly certain she doesn’t
mean Oll Korrect or any other
wrecked phonetic
from 1800’s slang
He curls reflexively into
the Dented Beer Can Defense
he learned on the yeasty streets
of Milwaukee’s downward mobility
He’s been lost ever since
he saw her with a death’s head
on her parasol and scented
the conscripted vanilla
over the pulse points in her wrists
Now all the plot has boiled off
Can’t they just relax into being sad
Together they used to make
one thing mean a thousand
Now they will say anything
to talk over the bass note
of Get the hell away from me
making all the tumblers
in their biology itch
Dessert is a honeycomb’s cypher
draped on a flash-frozen fig
and he longs for the late-night
consolation
in the bound pot roast
For its comforting luggage
and the dilapidated taste
of its fatty transit
Simeon Berry lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. He has been an Associate Editor for Ploughshares and received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant. His first book, Ampersand Revisited (Fence Books), won the 2013 National Poetry Series, and his second book, Monograph (University of Georgia Press), wonthe 2014 National Poetry Series.
These poems are from Nix, a book-length sequence I recently completed, which serves as the refracted biography of a doppelganger figure, a textual interloper drawn involuntarily into various genres and archetypes as he struggles with both narrative and gender instability. Other poems from the sequence can be found here, here, here, here, here and here.
1 Comment
Nice work!!! “The grits look disinfected” is a great line…