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.