Here Beside Us with Us
I ask a tour guide with cancer if there is anything else out there besides violent chaos. No, he says. Applying cucumber mint balm, my lips go from mildly dry to cool and refreshed, and I feel able to step toward the window, a square of absolute light. The moon, most of the sky, fits in one dewdrop. Our bad thoughts like a cape. Ask a pharmacist what drug you should have and they will never tell you the right one. They will grunt you to the creams. We really only need 15 minutes alone a day. But it better be alone alone. The moon's wide forehead. Window-like arms. Teeth, river stones for our tongue. When I reach for you slowly, it's because I want to touch you right. The moon's wide forehead. Is somewhere.
A Crumb of Wind
On the horizon, a man in a barn. The mist of a spring morning and pigs. He is painting 19th century hobo signs on canvas to sell to people with more money than him. A line of ants, a chicken with its eyes closed. The interstate growling. A top hat and a triangle. A triangle with hands. A few sticks in the road saying turn back, but we don't believe them. A jail cell is a jail cell. The kind lady with a cat let us wash. We're going to join somebody who's going to join somebody who's going to sea. They worked out the decibels of the Big Bang. Some people scream louder than that. Some people can't even scream.
Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His awards include a 2018 Pushcart Prize for Poetry. He lives in Syracuse, New York.
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Dustin Nightingale is the author of Ghost Woodpecker (BatCat Press, 2018). His poetry has been or will be published in journals such as The Florida Review, The American Journal of Poetry, new ohio review, Cimarron Review, and Coal Hill Review. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut.