ALTERNATE READING
Not words on
the page but
pointing into,
perpendicular
homing in
honed edges of
their first letters
glimpsed as
fishtails
schooling off
a Döppler-like
gradation into
unintended else
submersion just
below the page
I call and say
come quick
you’ll never guess
but it’s too late
Now you have to
The lamp light
on your face
is not the light
I know and now
neither is the face
***
ECLIPSE 1
When you entered
a shadow came
between your face
and my expectation
of it. I blamed
my treacherous eyes,
the sizzling
gooseneck lamp.
I wanted you to see
all one of me, as you
want me to see
your face in my
reflection.
But it doesn’t
work that way.
We are stuck
with being happy
or in love with
half a world.
***
VEHICLE
Advancing fragments
into the foreground,
brief and sharp
so that outside-us
will retreat, or flinch
or otherwise admit
what we produce.
It’s not much by way
of strategy, or even
worthy of the name
survival, but it gets
what we mean
from here to over
there, dusty, yes,
worn and ragged
at the knees, and yes
camouflaged
by the instant, and yes
transformed entirely
as we’d hoped.
***
Fred Muratori’s poems and flash prose pieces appear in recent issues of Volt, Hanging Loose, Inch, Manhattan Review, Duende, Miramar, and others. He has published three collections of poetry, the latest being A Civilization (Dos Madres Press, 2014) and The Spectra (Stockport Flats Press, 2011). He lives and works in Ithaca, NY.
As It Ought To Be 