M. Wright

Radiosonde

It might seem unnatural           to harpoon stars from the sky.
To hang them                 fish-hooked under lampshades

and call them possessions.           If you are a belly
that faces different colored ceilings          each night,

you are probably           a satellite            or a metal whir
that can count the number of hairs on my head.

It doesn’t have to be                   a profession.     To drop
soap into a bath and watch it bubble up or
 
to clean the contents of a jelly jar           and wait for Wednesday
to take it from the blue bin at the end of the drive.

If it doesn’t bother the neighbors           you can even
rehearse duck-and-cover drills just to see what it’s like

to be the froth in the bath         or the jam spread out and
staled. And it doesn’t cost a thing to call the tub an ocean.

You can collect data    on your own     with nothing more
than a breathing straw             and a patch of Atlantic.

Float with your head down and arms out.    See a set of barbels
lock eyes           with a landmine. A Super Size plastic cup

housing a family, its block-lettering   fixed to outlast the species.
A signal traveling        from seabed to surface so abruptly

it would have the bends          if not for the fact that you
can’t paralyze a sound, no matter        how fast you yank it,

like you can’t carry pith to letter without loss of fidelity. Which
is to say it is perfectly acceptable to simulate           being
 
if your home is             the heart of a projected radius. Take a
moment and marvel at your belongings, they are incredible.

---

Come on in my kitchen

The clocked-in field hours                      antlers stiff,
the stuff of dust collected by the inches, dead-
gentle               the slow flick of my right ear.

Howls and boots break the floorboards, a hail
of calloused heels       making to hum the whole catalogue.
The house          the family, the feversome white fence.

I crawl out from             cement-capped
rows of grass and fodder           so January empty
past truck beds and burials I might have
 
stopped and grown up and died in
without ever seeing a snow globe take the
last people left to a new world
 
where you can          pluck the moon out
from the sky             rub it on your fur
and bite right through the worm.
 
The yard churned       tectonic winter,
folding into itself. I let it happen.
I pressed my wet nose to the glass with gratitude.
 
The woman held a knife to the table
and juiced twelve bones without
getting any blood         on the floor.
 
The children were fiddlers      were singing, were
changing what it meant to sing with the dead.
It was sensational.
 
I’d have plaque’d myself right then, shacked up
and surrendered my head if I could. Would have,
if not for the stacks pulling my horns
 
to the truck bed. The night was closing around the family
like a rescue ship and it was leaving me folded,
leaving me spirited with a front-middle view.




--
M. Wright is the author of the chapbooks a boy named jane (Bottlecap Press) and Dear Dementia (Ghost City Press), which was featured in the 25th annual Poets House Showcase. He is a Best of the Net 2017 finalist and his poems have recently appeared in Glass Poetry, UCity Review, Wildness, Saint Paul Almanac, Temenos Journal, and others. Born in Chicago, M. currently resides with his lovely partner, Dylan, in Minneapolis.