Kintsugi
by Conor Bracken
Sometimes you touch me and it is neither of us
touching. It is a rock and a throat, a feather
and an anvil. Sometimes it sounds like I am singing
but that is just my voice smoothing fear into shape.
All the time I want the deaths inside us
to touch, but sometimes I cannot see
who you are through the scrim of pleasure
and I only want to touch your end, your promise
to eternity which you carry lightly so as not to
break its delicate stems. My love, I am
far away from you right now, and on the fridge
of this rented house is one of those cheap sepia-toned cards
with indolent witticisms written on them:
three women staring out of a jail cell captioned The Trouble
with Trouble is it starts out as Fun. And outside,
a red flag day on the lake with two people wading
out of the waves. So far
they are surviving. From here
it sounds like they are laughing
but I know I mistake the sound of crashing
for happy, the shatter of glass for ecstasy
though whenever you fit my name
onto the blindness enveloping the two of us
there’s a seam inside me welded
that only you have the strength to break.
touching. It is a rock and a throat, a feather
and an anvil. Sometimes it sounds like I am singing
but that is just my voice smoothing fear into shape.
All the time I want the deaths inside us
to touch, but sometimes I cannot see
who you are through the scrim of pleasure
and I only want to touch your end, your promise
to eternity which you carry lightly so as not to
break its delicate stems. My love, I am
far away from you right now, and on the fridge
of this rented house is one of those cheap sepia-toned cards
with indolent witticisms written on them:
three women staring out of a jail cell captioned The Trouble
with Trouble is it starts out as Fun. And outside,
a red flag day on the lake with two people wading
out of the waves. So far
they are surviving. From here
it sounds like they are laughing
but I know I mistake the sound of crashing
for happy, the shatter of glass for ecstasy
though whenever you fit my name
onto the blindness enveloping the two of us
there’s a seam inside me welded
that only you have the strength to break.
Conor Bracken has recent work appearing or forthcoming in the Adroit Journal, Forklift OH, Love's Executive Order, The New Yorker, and THRUSH, among others. His chapbook, Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour, selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition, will be published by Bull City Press in late 2017. A graduate of Virginia Tech, a former poetry editor for Gulf Coast, and the assistant director of a university writing center, he received his MFA from the University of Houston, where he and his wife currently live.
