by Daniel Brennan
The black-lipped winter. This boiling lobster pot
You ask remember the blizzard of ’98
so I answer how long have we been on this
collision course or perhaps I say
nothing at all, a sweat breaking
in our bed. Sometimes, I do better
with a silence. The geese do not return
from down south. The lakes slosh and churn,
tempered face, warm face.
*
The animals I dream of no longer
have use for their names.
You say we never did see the great
Pinta Island tortoise and I reply empty
this cage of a mouth, see what else
it can no longer name and perhaps
my skin is the skin of beasts calling
back to me from the past tense. If
we cannot remember the world as it was,
what hope do your hands possibly have
digging through the earth of my body?
*
The Ocean sings in the language of
catastrophe, shoreline along the Atlantic
an amalgam of teeth and plastic ribbing.
Your lips do not part. You just stare
into the slim wound of horizon as I dangle
my feet from the pier. We bathe in the silence,
let brine whip the evening air into
a prophecy we’ll never live to see.
What goodness is held in swelling bluffs,
the frenzied froth of tide, when it’s merely
a tongue waiting to lick our bones clean? These
are the questions you do not ask me.
*
I live in fear of the answers: it hardly matters
the question now, only that we move day
to day in a state of wondering, of looking
over our shoulder; the future skulking
along the margins with a predator’s gait.
Under unseasonal rainfall, I could ask you
what happens next, the sharp angle
of your bones catching
into the hook of mine. Instead,
I linger in empty rooms, lips still, listening
for your slowing step, your hesitance. Beasts and
oceans and winters scratching the inside of
my skull, begging me to recall their names.
Is it too late to imagine a life together?
Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a queer writer and coffee devotee from New York. Sometimes he’s in love, just as often he’s not. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize/Best of the Net, and has appeared in numerous publications, including The Penn Review, Sho Poetry Journal, and Trampset. He can be found on Twitter @DanielJBrennan_
Emerge Literary Journal 