Poetry Submissions
Neither Here
Nor There
By Marc Pietrzykowski
Alexander is an astronaut with a shrunken monkey’s head tucked inside a pocket of his jumpsuit—it pokes into his thigh as they leave the earth, a secret bit of luck his crew mates know nothing of, each pressed into their own upright cradle. The skin of his face pulls back as he remembers Carnaval, how Diana’s face spread in amusement when he traded money for the tiny, burnt skull, how the year she loved him seemed as boundless as the inconclusive curve of space—he will show his charm, later, once the booster has leapt into the sea and the station has been joined with; placing it on the bright, narrow shelf above his bed, he will call Paolo, the botanist, over to see this thing that held them safe in a cocoon of magic as they rose through, and over, and then majestically above clouds. Holding the little knob in his hands, Paolo will think how much it resembles an amaryllis bulb, and how his grandfather may, at this very moment, be prodding holes in dirt with a stick and thrusting bulbs down into them, wiping his hands on his trousers, and looking up at the blank sky, wondering if they will be lucky enough to see rain today.
•••
The Lattice
By Marc Pietrzykowski
We drive at night, a long, flat highway, fog making headlights on the other side weep into sickly, yellow, two-eyed clouds that swell and swell as they bear down on us and then clip! Disappear into the void: our own eyes adjust, there are things alive in there, in the mist, then another car approaches, light seeping into vapor like blood in a bandage, like winter glass and lamp wick, like a child learning to peek through the threadbare patches of a blanket and so make the world strange and dim, more than learning what was strange and dim already. Over an underpass ahead flashes an ambulance, a bleating rectangle of red slicing left-to-right: road bisects road, a lattice dropped on terra firma; though we cannot find design, we build it, and so ride through the fog in little spheres of light. Down into a valley, the dark thickens; to the left, galaxies implode, to the right, an ambulance stops, a boy thrown through a windshield lies bent, a blanket turns into a shroud, the ambulance lights pulse like a quasar but more strange, more dim, and all at once we emerge from the fog: there in the moonlight are trees, and garbage, and mailboxes; toothy, broken fenceposts and deer’s eyes darting past, iridescent; we emerge from the fog and think, ah, there, I can see,
I can see everything now.
MARC PIETRZYKOWSKI will read from his work as a part of the Literary Raiders of Niagara Reading Series at 7 p. m. Thursday at Talking Leaves Books, 3158 Main St. A recent graduate of Georgia State University’s Ph. D. program in English, he teaches at Niagara County Community College. He is the author of “…And the whole time I was quite happy,” a collection of poems that was published by Zeitgeist Press in February 2008. Last month, he was the winner of the first annual Just Buffalo member poetry contest.
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