by Garrett Ray Riggs
Metaphor is the Momentum Between Gestures
& I am Coptic,
you are Christ, my heart a slit lamb, punctured,
slick at the throat. The alchemist’s optic
obsession: stuff to gold & never back.
Even the vein, sexual, royal purple,
royal, textual: as lunar black
sometimes, on paper, becomes inevitably
smoke white. All the swollen signs of night:
from the full satellite, the early year moons —wolf, snow— to
the slow diastole of chest, the right-
hand turn before your house, &, of course, you.
What to do about you? Perhaps a Taj,
wrench an adagio from my rib,
or maybe it’s enough to adjust
the pillow under your head. I can give
you my word: in some future I will shake
your husband’s hand, hold your face
& say, “It’s wonderful to see you
again.” We will both turn away in shock,
proud we pulled it off, proud of our disgrace.
We will smile. There will be nothing left to do.
There will be nothing left to do except
go home & make love in separate beds.
There will be nothing left but to accept
a world without regard for what is said.
It is the momentum between gestures — & I am
Emmanuel & you are the sepulcher.
Adagio
Beginning is like tracing lamplit ellipses. The wall against your finger
tells of fresh heat settled over a room we do not own and don’t care to.
The processional sweat of night makes this bed the bottom of a body of water.
Behind your head, the seawall—static, insomniac—maintains against what erodes.
Crumbling quiet is the measure of your voice, your immortal torso,
the mercy of your legs around me. We’ve made something of ourselves.
Extending at the elbows until all that is left is extension. Euphony
bends without angle: this nameless part of your throat. We have left behind theme:
air, a dance of vengeance, a quiet city, an old man’s collected songs where every verse
is grief in the tempest of a stolen bucket. And you can arrange to forget my face.
Lips might be nothing more than shadow waiting for day, bodiless as song.
The human mouth fills with foam. I will make something of you.
For your body, a slow stretch of bow across beauty bedded down in sound.
Your body, like a long vowel held in the composition of my breath.
In
the
next
lifetime
God
sends down
pills
for his
people
wafers of
biochemistry
to keep us
equal
whip-its
for the
kids
and
for us
for the obsessed
of psyche: fucking shit
what
is
quick
wit
coprolalia
of purity
in the world’s
next life:
rungs
up from
the asylum
like Jacob’s
God
rages
with the
orderlies
kingdom
phylum
class
order
and
so on
in-
finity
the ordered
legions
of wings
the
severe
angels push
their hard
bodies
into ours
we begin
to love
them for
their
brutality
for them
knowing
nine ways
to enter
the human
body
this is
for the
girl
they say
who bears
African violets
into the
New World
this
is for
your world
of poetry
Issam Zineh is a Palestinian-American poet and scientist. He is the author of the forthcoming chapbook The Moment of Greatest Alienation (Ethel Press, Spring 2021). His poems appear or are forthcoming in Clockhouse, Fjords Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist), Nimrod, Poet Lore, The Seattle Review, and elsewhere. He also reviews for The Poetry Café (https://thepoetrycafe.online). Find him on Twitter @izineh.
Garrett Ray Riggs is a writer and artist who lives in Florida with his family and a herd of cats. His work has been published in Quail Bell Magazine, Another Chicago Magazine, Mary: A Journal of New Writing, Siren’s Call, and Bright Lights Film Journal.