MUZZLE MAGAZINE
  • Home
  • Fall 2022
  • Submissions
  • Archives
  • Blog

After Hours, Provincetown Cemetery

KENDRA DECOLO

Tonight my dead are restless, 
           reincarnating themselves
                       with names like Glissando

and Surreptitious. I want a tree
           to be a tree again, not this trick
                        of light, chaos of muscle curved

into the neck of a violin.
            Autumn welds itself
                       to the seams of August

and we are saddled by its heat,
            the heart of silence
                        smooth as a gun.

You are somewhere
           iridescent and unholy,
                      a sharp horizon of a man,

traveling circus broken
           into luminous machinery,
                      a caravan pounding like horses

along the highway. You,
            dog-toothed piano,
                        Queen whose glittered

lashes eat up the dark.
             Your words are thumbprints
                        on the eyelids of the gods.

Your body is the book
           I break into, hijacked
                       of meaning. Your voice,

ejaculation of moonlight,
            your speeding    
                        ticket sex, gold-veined

heart—tonight you are
           my only shelter. I inhabit you
                      like a squatter, burning

my one small light
           in this cemetery of thieves.

Kendra DeColo’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the 2012 Best of the Net Anthology, Vinyl Poetry, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, CALYX, Split This Rock: Poems of Witness and Provocation, Printer’s Devil Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a work-study scholarship from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, residency awards from the Millay Colony and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Kendra is the founding poetry editor of Nashville Review and lives in Nashville, Tennessee. 
ISSN 2157-8079
  • Home
  • Fall 2022
  • Submissions
  • Archives
  • Blog