A Poem by Arturo Desimone

Despite My Best Efforts at Arriving Late to Every Meeting, There it Persists, A Fetal Clock Nascent in Me

My hands like leaves,
my 2 gentle hands:  husband and wife

I want to pull husband from wife
child from mother
master past his managers
politician past stage managers
they have misunderstood unity
and reunion is not in the air-conditioning
It is at the frontier of death
and the lovers are many
solitudes

the winter kills the beggar saints
who could pay radius
the winter kills micro-organisms, but the demons
will awaken, with or without the pagan carnival
that allows the stupid country-folk to remain animate
and survive the demons, mocking them in the anonymity
of the act of wooden masked mating.

The solitudes can be lovers
and never partners, and never
house-bound, for that is
the heart's death
preferred to its wings set
on inexterminable fire:
my only race was concealment.

Arturo Desimone's poems and short fiction pieces have previously appeared in Counterpunch, New Orleans Review and The Missing Slate.  A recent artistic collaboration with the Netherlands-based Iranian film-maker, Atousa Bandeh, brought his poetry into the video art film The Apology Triptych.  Arturo was born and raised on the island Aruba, in the Dutch Caribbean, and is currently based between Buenos Aires and the Netherlands.