Poem with Death as Subjectand InterlocutorBy Seth Simons
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After Steve Scafidi
A harp. A mandolin. The black ivory
keys of a clavichord Chopin discarded. Horse shit simmering in the street in Vienna. Two boys carting it away, the way the grey playthings of their bones browned and the ground recognized itself today. In a dim house in Harrisburg last week my mother found a letter her father wrote young and in love with all the wrong things and Venetian cannoli he said is not nearly as sweet as my grandmother’s pussy and the sugar and the spray of bullets and the flashbang birdsong of cities blessed by fire with fire and fire he said is what lasts of us when You’ve left—oh— Angel of Smoke and of Death, Killer of Chopin and What Comes Next. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me the secret to joy or a joke you heard in the silk bellows of the pipe organ I imagine Hell must be, some words full of bluster and silly like music is silly or prayer or the busy convolutions of poetry I think too much of and lovely enough to offer some fig leaf of peace to the bones clicking like padlocks or locusts beneath us rising up in warships to take it all back— this city, that frozen port, this blasted heath, these eighty years of happiness and emptiness and the silliness of my father’s laugh and my mother’s laugh and the jokes I told at a bar last night where strangers laughed maybe at the stupid way my hand shakes as I hold the mic to the lips of the mouth on the face my grandfather gave me, you bastard, tell me this was all for love and if it was what that means. Poem for Upright CitizensBy Seth Simons
Congratulations to the prince on his engagement!
Today I made sixty dollars writing my sentences for the Internet. They weren’t exceptional but they did the trick. It came time to refill the hummingbird feeder. My darlings have simple tastes: four parts water one part sugar. I read of a shark biologists believe to be five hundred years old. Great job shark! Your wisdom I’d wager is immense and inapplicable. Five hundred years ago Martin Luther wrote what must be the most theses ever penned in one go. Then came the typical mayhem rubbling nations in its wake. Martin you dog! Comedians are yelling at me online. They despise me for complex laughable reasons I don’t have time to explain. I text my friend Sarah Sarah everything I love is the stupidest it is so stupid only I understand also you also hundreds perhaps thousands happily paying no attention eating forkfuls of pasta gazing out over the Riviera. Seth calm down Sarah says. I’m calm I say. Seth Simons is a writer and editor based in
the Bay Area, where he works as a journalist covering the entertainment
industry. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Fugue, Breakwater Review, Conduit, Rivet, and the McNeese Review.
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