poetry

Two Sonnets by Benjamin Clancy

All My Friends Are Elevator Shafts or Carrier Pigeons

I black out for an hour. Grin around the block. Footprints in the snow.
Remember us on balconies, baby. You wore chandeliers of moonlight,
you got on a plane, your future was an emerald. Picture me at 2am,
arm in arm with a friend. Both of us, falling down an open block.
The night hisses cold like an elevator shaft, but it doesn’t snow.
We’re looking for polished hands to drip some honey on our chests.
I listen to the ground as I walk, ears pricked up for the crunch of bones.
At a party a boy hugs me & tells me my aura is teal. My heart:
a mirror or a pit, depending. I’m balanced on his knee later,
unsure if anyone considers what I consider sexual to be sexual.
I imagine a society formed by a 100-mile foot race. The winner
gets to go wherever she wants and the losers build their homes
where they’re standing when they get word that they’ve lost.
No one’s a winner where I live. Our doors are open for anyone. 

 

Two Dreams

It is April 12, 2013. I am removing my shirt in a 100-degree parking lot.
I’m sorry that I missed your call a month ago. I was busy in the bathroom
employing a diamond edge to extract myself from myself. I called it love
as if love was the woods beyond the house where you bury your own body.
Then the city comes & eats the woods, I guess. The opposite of this union
between sun & freckled shoulders. My shirt off in a 100-degree parking lot.
Mindful of the gaze of the sun. Begging on the eyes of strangers as they
mill about the shops. Hello, April. I’m alive again. Tell March it did its best
but now my mouth is full of fruit. I am thinking of the first time you took
off my shirt (“how come I’m naked & you’re not?”) as the sun paints
with the salt of less passionate beings. An artist paints a still life of a table.
She sets the table with everything you’ve been looking past.
She takes your hands in hers & demands
that you look after yourself. 

 

 

Editor's Note: Versions of these poems have previously appeared in a chapbook called "The Only Living Things In Texas," which exists in internet space here.

 

Benjamin Clancy studied English and Philosophy at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He lives, writes, and contemplates dying in Austin, Texas. He posts things to this tumblr.