Poem of the Week: Frank Montesonti

Sad Indianapolis

I go to the movie theatre
to look at the rows of exit lights

just to feel like I’m landing in my life.

I tried to pull the world back
from the explosion;

but it is snowing;

the sky looks like
falling ash.

Each morning I stitch together
a moment, say,

the muted
light around a bowl of peaches,

but soon the junior
senator in me so timidly casts
his vote for desire

I can barely pour the milk.

Sad Indianapolis, famous
only for a race

that comes once a year,
the noise so loud it evacuates
the head briefly
and orderly

like a fire drill; then it all returns:

worries, regrets,
Yvonne, the hilltop, endless strip-
mall parking lots

where I would sit
as a teenager, the tongue
of the world on my battery,
and feel a huge, yet exact

emptiness, as if someone
were unfolding thousands of
little origami cranes in my chest.

This is a thankless town. You could burn
it and it would look better.

But still my heart
still wins, its penny slots

sometimes just walking
the neighborhood, admiring leaves:

How do I say this?

What I want is some ugly little
animal to be invented,
unloved, unnecessary

to represent
what can’t be

put back in order. To live in place
of where I live.

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Frank Montesonti is the author of Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope (Barrow Street Press), and the chapbook A Civic Pageant (Black Lawrence Press, 2009). He has been published in literary journals such as Tin House, Black Warrior Review, AQR, Poet Lore, and Poems and Plays, among many others. His second full-length collection, Hope Tree, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2014. He has an MFA from the University of Arizona and teaches poetry at National University. A longtime resident of Indiana, he now lives in Los Angeles, California.