Two Poems by John Casquarelli

Hello, I’m a Mountain Oyster

 

for Jesse

 

suppose I threw a love affair

and nobody came?

not that life is inactive

both the cynic and the moralist offer equal opportunity

 

I know sharing the dark

doesn’t necessarily make me family

but it should guarantee not walking

into a relationship

with an executioner’s hood

 

perhaps it’s fate

perhaps it’s nature’s strange sense of humor

perhaps it’s a folder full of fragments

that leave my lips dry

amid black-inked comments

and electronic pixels

 

sometimes a room remembers

how to empty itself

 

this afternoon

it might feel good to be alive

laugh at the casual iambic oasis

imagine a woman

pressed against her window

each sign a rule

each sign a rule I want to break

 

sure

it’s selfish to believe my own angst

is exclusively my own

 

the crackle of the wood clock

in those brief intervals

when I try to convince myself

that I can’t overcome

 

I am grateful for double stairways

and the occasional changing traffic light

 

and when she wears her red linen dress

my ribcage rattles

my skin tells stories

of an amber pool

emerging from the bud

of a moonflower

Reruns of Electric Static

 

love is an old word

we forget every morning

amid mass machine

tendrils of granite

unconscious

 

red lights blink over

human tininess

iron brains tied to

overpriced university

 

we came for something

anything

nothing

then disappeared

as if to seal our silence

 

to haunt the editorial pages

the invisible Niagaras

whose scarred fingers

beg for cigarette

hotel room 4am

 

rejoice at the last syllables

of a Shakespearean sonnet

 

here in the face of war

here when the news greets us

with new health scares

here where Montreal

goes unreported

here where our taxes

fund our own prisons

here where visions lie scattered

across car graveyard

here amid the black bubbles

of refineries

here as we vanish in a cloud

of vague generalities

 

how easy trust can bleed

through acid sunsets

torn from stone tenements

that leave nostalgic aftertaste

 

wait for glass promise

under the harsh light

of yesterday

and write

on a sheet of paper

how each look resembles

a long absence

 

 

 

 

John Casquarelli is an English professor at Boricua College in New York. He received his M.F.A. in the Creative Writing program at Long Island University. He was awarded the 2010 Esther Hyneman Award for poetry. His work has appeared in several publications including Downtown Brooklyn, Kinship of Rivers, By The Overpass, Brooklyn Paramount, Pulp, The International Rebecca West Society, and Sun’s Skeleton. His first full-length book, On Equilibrium of Song, was published by Overpass Books (2011).