Among the Other Mourners of Zion
BY STEVE SUBRIZI
"She's a statue in your garden," says a circle jerk of pigeons
you fed to death last Sunday, but you don't even own a garden,
so you chuck your crackers down the sewer's throat and hit 95
like it broke into your house, when in reality it got framed
by science.
Science built you a time machine that can say, "We're all
in this together," and now a mix CD says it, and four lanes
bumper-to-bumper says it, and your spicy chicken sandwich
says it, but none of them live inside of it and on top of all else
the deck got jammed.
"In silence, you can listen to yourself," says a cavalcade
of crunchy-mouthed drive-thrus raising grease-bright hands.
"We are each a prisoner of our memories," says a truck stop
named Love's to a boxy red car you named Zombie W.B. Yeats
who is getting exhausted,
but Ronny Foxy Baby said you got to wear your momentum
the same way you wear your scars. Grab a card for your mantle
at a tattoo parlor in Portland, but then pull that junk up the hill
until you don't hear the blind sirens of grief. Grief travels both
as a wave
and as a barnacle. Even the ocean, that moody drunk, cannot
hide you from the law, front the bail, or recall one damn name
that you bark in that unfathomable direction—however, will mumble
some dry consolation if you sit beside enough evening, which is to say
that the tide will fall.
"She's a statue in your garden," says a circle jerk of pigeons
you fed to death last Sunday, but you don't even own a garden,
so you chuck your crackers down the sewer's throat and hit 95
like it broke into your house, when in reality it got framed
by science.
Science built you a time machine that can say, "We're all
in this together," and now a mix CD says it, and four lanes
bumper-to-bumper says it, and your spicy chicken sandwich
says it, but none of them live inside of it and on top of all else
the deck got jammed.
"In silence, you can listen to yourself," says a cavalcade
of crunchy-mouthed drive-thrus raising grease-bright hands.
"We are each a prisoner of our memories," says a truck stop
named Love's to a boxy red car you named Zombie W.B. Yeats
who is getting exhausted,
but Ronny Foxy Baby said you got to wear your momentum
the same way you wear your scars. Grab a card for your mantle
at a tattoo parlor in Portland, but then pull that junk up the hill
until you don't hear the blind sirens of grief. Grief travels both
as a wave
and as a barnacle. Even the ocean, that moody drunk, cannot
hide you from the law, front the bail, or recall one damn name
that you bark in that unfathomable direction—however, will mumble
some dry consolation if you sit beside enough evening, which is to say
that the tide will fall.
STEVE SUBRIZI sometimes cohosts the Wednesday night poetry mic at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has performed his work in such other venues as the Green Mill in Chicago and the Mercury Cafe in Denver, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in PANK Magazine, The Legendary, Phantom Kangaroo, The Scrambler, Monday Night, and Ramshackle Review. He blogs drafts and occasional vegan recipes at http://theprettiestgirlinschool.blogspot.com/.