Spotlights, Not Daylight
He’s backed up against
an extraordinary block of black.
The situation—bright flesh tint—
calls for boldness but he is
stock still, songs
logjammed in his throat.
The family room fills up
with the tang of fruit flies.
Rows and rows of light bulbs
on the ceiling like at a casino.
The sockets are zapped.
His friends are not at home, but
pressing themselves unwillingly
facedown on the shimmering asphalt,
cocaine in a pocket.
Now he is naked inside a deep
charcoal grey, magnetic weight
on his chest. It’s late in the
afternoon.
With his throat he makes a sound.
Out in the yard he and his friends
used to take turns dying, extra points
for
the most disgusting ketchup
substitute.
A door opens. An hour passes.
He thinks about scrambling
up onto the roof where the laundry
snaps and flutters, freeing the
shirts,
then his friends from cocaine
and danger. He sees them
running through the streets,
just like that.
***
Light Strikes What it Can
Those who inherit the loneliness of
the North Pole
must speak or break.
The little kid warms his hands in an
ice bucket,
feet in a dream of the Arctic Ocean,
driving an iceberg
across golden tundra into a black so
dense
it sparks and stutters.
Elements of a melody
arrange themselves overhead,
half-remembered—
Below a certain temperature
sounds amplify, shift spectra, alter
childhood hearing
so he doesn’t react¾much¾
to the faint-faint crunch of
crackled snow.
Plains undulate north,
indecipherable
in tarnished medium grey, horizon-grey,
their beauty weightless but
registering in his mind.
The hunter is motionless, hidden.
The bears, if present,
are the same scruffy white as the
snow.
Conn has written eight books of poetry, most recently Edge Effects, 2012. Her book South of the Tudo Bem Cafe, 1990, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award. Conn is a member of the collaborative poetry group Yoko's Dogs whose first book, Whisk, was published by Pedlar's Press in 2013. about Jan Conn .... about Yoko's Dogs
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