Like a Thousand Things Still in Flight
by Brandon J. Courtney

It still amazes me.

                           You smoking on the corner of the bed,

             blowing pale little smoke rings through larger ones

knitting your lips and tongue until some

                                        corporal target hovers

             momentarily absolute,

then storybook when you startle

             as a bird quivers awake in the attic.

How every time a thermometer shatters between your teeth

                         you hear marbles dropping on mirrors, see ghosts made

            from coffee filters swimming from your mouth.

            My tongue simply absorbs the words you’ll never hear.

Let’s believe mostly in our mouths

            and call the smell of warm dust limping from the vents

the diction of this room, call your morning dress: extinguisher,

            the quelling static of lace against hipbones.

Because it still amazes me to think,

                           that I can see no further than the high-rise behind you,

the forgery of sky lifted from gallery walls,

            the autumn leaves like traffic lights oscillating green,

            then yellow, then red,

in the updraft of alleyways; in the parking lot’s dark anatomy.

Consider the house key you broke in the lock of your body a blessing.

No more will the boys vanish from your field,

than call it standing alone in a landscape.

            No more will the boys write your name in chalk,

erase it with their hands,

and clap you into dust.

 

BRANDON J. COURTNEY spent four years in the United States Navy. His poetry is forthcoming or appears in Best New Poets 2009, tinfoildresses, and Fogged Clarity. When not writing, he obsessively collects records from the early nineties. He is currently pursuing a BA in Writing from Drake University in Des Moines, IA, where he is finishing his manuscript titled When the Ocean is an Autoclave.

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