Poetry from NER 43.2 (2022)
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I’m cracked open and all I have are the cool rooms
of museums, one altar after another after another,
strange alchemies and rituals and manifestos in paint.
At the last museum, having fallen out of love
with humanity,
I outgrew my leather pants, irony,
nuclear rage, and even though there would be
new pants, new shades of rage, I didn’t feel hope then.
Griefs made words useless, so I drank from the oasis of color.
I’m free to be invisible, a novitiate trembling in exaltation,
in love and inept. Oblivion can be dark but placid,
can be blue but green. I rounded the gallery’s hallways
to traces of rich ladies in jeweled, dappled
amber, to their invariably opalescent white skin, and beneath
the canvas, a craving vocation brought me into my hands,
my limbs, outside of the sad box of words I had
carelessly poured into everything I had.