Poems by AUSTIN SEGREST, from The Groom.
Table of Contents:
• The Groom
• After Caravaggio
• Revision
• Raptures
Uwi verb
to go back to your residence.
One word, meaning to return,
not just anywhere, but home.
I rode a slow bus out of blackness.
Five a.m. in northern Greece.
The language, blurry and mumbled.
I paid pastel money for a bus
ticket to Ouranopolis whose name
means “City of Heaven.”
There’s an itch in my throat like fox fur,
broom bush, cactus whittled to dust,
and my son thinks the city has vanished,
Nostalgia is a well-
intentioned wound,
you have to hold
it in mind all at once—
you have to need it
enough. I’ve been
By ANANDA LIMA
I close my right eye meu olho direito
and see everything tudo que
my mother my father meus pais no meu país
didn’t
know não sabiam
to do tudo
then que fazer?
e hoje, minha vista cansada
Single-headed.
Flowering inwardly.
Barely felt in the birth canal.
Medical marketer.
Sick with planet.
By JOHN FREEMAN
Backlit by the glow
from a small passageway,
he kneels into the fog
of yellow light,
head kissing the carpet.
I step around him,
respecting his privacy, when
the mat becomes not prayer
rug but builder’s tool,
a black piece of tarmac, laid down
before the bank so he could
peer close, fix the dead
motion sensor so that people
with money could
be seen, all doors opening
for them.
By TARA SKURTU
It was the first time I’d lived
with a man, and I wanted him
to translate the name of our street.
He was holding my cold fist
in his own, and we were on
Ofrandei, in the middle of unpaved
Bragadiru, Romania, on our way
home. It’s something you give
to get something—like a sacrifice.
Like what you do for a god.
The quickness of living.
The quickness of wanting to kill something.
Forget dreams, they attack me and
I welcome their landings.
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