A Poem by April Salzano

Allusion

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Do not take it to someone else this time.
There is no way to say this,
you look at me like I am an emergency.
All day, gluing my church
of burnt matchsticks.  Out here
I am more alone with you than without
you, not waving but drowning.  That blue,
uncertain, stumbling buzz, that certain
slant of light, the worst
laugh I have ever laughed, while I weep.
I have been her kind, passed
hand to hand like a bowl of fruit.  The black
phone is off at the root.  I wandered lonely
as a cloud, saw the best minds
of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving naked hysterical, asking why
for the love of god we did this to ourselves.



April Salzano teaches college writing in Pennsylvania and is working on her first (several) poetry collections and an autobiographical work on raising a child with Autsim.  Her work has appeared in Poetry Salzburg, Pyrokinection, Convergence, Ascent Aspiration, Deadsnakes, The Rainbow Rose and other online and print journals and is forthcoming in Inclement, Poetry Quarterly and Bluestem.