ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Matthew DeMarco lives in Chicago. His work has appeared on Poets.org and in Ghost City Review, Landfill, Jet Fuel Review, Sporklet, and elsewhere. Poems that he wrote with Faizan Syed have appeared in Dogbird and They Said, an anthology of collaborative writing from Black Lawrence Press.
Look Up, Look Up!
Moonlight skips across cobblestones
like a flat stone skimming
the roiling surface of a backlit pond.
The night air carries the bobbing
of our feet — our arms, in the buoyant dark, encircle
the jacket-draped slickness of each other’s waists.
Tonight the glow of cast-off neon warms my eyes.
The wet rush of traffic salves the cuts that lace
my hands, and the sulfur night wafts into the lattice
of my hair. In the here-and-there canopy, Chicago’s leaves
twist starkly on the fingers of each deep-rooted tree.
Orange is everywhere, fills up every single piece of air.
All of this to say, quite simply, that our palms meet,
that we swallow each other deep into the alleys of a rich
black sky. A pink disco ball throbs with light
inside the stony chest. The ball strains hard
against its tether. October is gone long before
we lift our heads and raise our eyes together.
I regularly find myself gob-smacked by the way I fall asleep in autumn and wake up in winter. It seems like there’s always some moment in the middle of December or January when I suddenly think to myself, “Damn, it’s been cold for a while now, hasn’t it?” I think transitional seasons, like autumn, are pretty magical. Magical things take place when you try to pay attention to transitional seasons and the people you share them with, because you’re sort of agreeing to anticipate a specific moment that you won’t actually notice when it does happen; you’ll only recognize that it has happened. It’s a wonderful place to get lost in.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
