Love Song With Eclipsed Objects [Copla Unificada Con Los Súbditos Sacrificados]
Our dalliance folds a planet.
As you, so as I, our separate
fumbling with collisions. “Some”:
the dough of distant substitutions
surging skies arching fair slaughter.
In our “all” I will not forget how
we erupted in an alphabet of alliances.
A preceding that law maybe mingled
with blood in gratuities of shattered vessels
where the reasons someone must
have had once fail their say.
Before, it seemed that you belonged
naught but a steep pitch
of engagements. You pirated
your successive shapes not from
the seals and urchins, but the green
and khaki of the reefs bleaching
in their own afterbirth. Had we capitalized suns
for oceans, our diadems for sand, we might
have existed angels or idols at their least.
My vision swayed itself after points: the bluely
fastidious heaps, the blasted stalls and staircases
tinily wild as uncovered hair. You ceased my gall,
mesmerized my kidneys’ suppose. How well
my brinks softened in awaiting a multiplication
of arrows. Our glorious carcasses and
brickwork endorse only one foundation at a turn,
as though adjacency emerges an enemy flare.
This arrogance disappears our parentage,
covering it in hum. And our judgement
is hardly to be listened beyond
the profanities of children unwanting
those sacrifices ebbed
of their own hunger.
Debts are paid to renditions
collected in the dark. Infatuation arrives
the moon, however tideless, blindfolding
any landscape. “Cannot” runs one mouth
upon another. Autumn has plucked
Eden, and, in the ascendence
of the hand over the heart, the
head, the soil, the tree, the beasts,
the legs, the clothes, the words,
the shoe, these scenarios of gobbling
earth, these tournaments all zeroed,
we think only of tending our loyalties.
Joe Milazzo is is the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie (Jaded Ibis Press) and The Habiliments (Apostrophe Books; forthcoming, 2015), a volume of poetry. His writings have appeared in Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, The Collagist, Drunken Boat, Fruita Pulp, Tammy, and elsewhere. He co-edits the online interdisciplinary arts journal [out of nothing], is a Contributing Editor at Entropy, and is also the proprietor of Imipolex Press. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, and his virtual location is http://www.slowstudies.net/