Pooles

Of Tall Grasses

By Anton Pooles

Lost for years
I’ve been lost
Lost for years
Years I’ve lost
Being lost
I’ve been lost
Lost for years

Timothée Chalamet

By Anton Pooles

How can anyone handle this
           blistering summer heat?
Heat
like in a Rossellini film.
Italian summers
                        burning
in black and white.
Passion
without love. Glamour
without trying.
How can anyone
look that good
            in this heat.

Slow pan to the boy
            by the swimming pool,

trying to appear cool
in his expensive sunglasses.
Peach fuzz,
sweat glossing
his bare skin.
He knows all the poses
the camera likes.

He knows the nuances
of style
are as simple
as how he parts his lips.

Some thrive under
these conditions—myself,

lacking such nuances,

lies beneath the sun
dreaming of cloud cover.

The Perfect Night

By Anton Pooles

Insomnia can’t bother me tonight—
I am already awake. I am outside
burying my poetry among my father’s flowers.
My father has kept his flowers alive.
I, on the other hand, have let my poems die.
I tried to care and prune them properly,
but I always removed to much.
I tried to provide them with lots of sunlight,
but I brought cloud cover wherever I went.
Well, what about rain? No, that never came.
The poems dried up like autumn leaves,
each with their own distinct dark shades
of orange and yellow and red—
pretty little things, even when dead.
The moonlight transforms the garden,
the grass shimmers like snow needles
and the wisteria, that normally drops over
the fence, falls like the hair of a tree nymph.
Yes, I chose the perfect night
to bury these poems—it’s so, so silent,
there isn’t a word in the air.

Anton Pooles was born in Novosibirsk, Siberia and now lives and writes in Toronto, Ontario. His work has appeared in an array of journals and magazines. He is the author of the chapbook Monster 36 (Anstruther Press, 2018) and the full-length collection Ghost Walk (Mansfield Press, 2022).

Twitter: @AntonPooles