Phone Booth Parable
So much has gone missing where
are the words our parents read aloud
long storks on the bedroom wall
midflight I never got a good look
at what they carried all that way
to the window why
fly when the ground is so good
at pulling you down said the scarecrow
how’s the reception on your end is it
better to persuade or just
push your tongue into my mouth
a little taste of what wrong
numbers can do said the tin man
whose speech should be good for
another few miles already
the moon over bruise over stubble shorts
out when so many TVs
howl at once said the lion we’ll
come back as dogs to bury our own
bones but time is a limiting factor
I’ve stepped onto platforms only to be
told I missed the boat and my
beloved whistling out at sea
for years the tin man couldn’t describe
what he looked like counting his change
or the message on my phone he
left the cord swinging
Object Relations
Ours was a fine-tuned affair. I scrubbed the day’s soot
in my hair while you polished your feet,
your glass toe etched with a hummingbird’s beak.
Nights you kept it in a velvet box.
I wanted you to wear your toe
in faux fleece slippers, in bed. It would whisper
on the desk edge. When you put on your socks,
it whimpered. Cooped thing, bearing your weight
through the crushed pampas after a meal,
a dog at the fence, the filament above our rest
quavering like a trapped fly. Predawn,
I took your toe outside and held it up
to the moon. “What weighs on you
also weighs on me,” I said as the cold air
lapped my bare legs. “But how can I leave
our labors in the dark unfinished?”
It lowed in my palm, then grew quiet
under my gaze and warm. I saw the lines
on my hand crisscross beneath it
like a crumpled map, too faded now to read.
How troubling a conscience is
when it’s clear, my love, close to invisible.
Moles bored the night in half:
one for your fevered, chainless dream,
the other for my taking, my giving back.
Handsel
The fruit bat’s version of happy
is upside down and fitful
leather.
Give me that rapture
you think I deserve,
no less.
Once, at a fire sale, I optioned a knife
without its guide, chose
how the leaves would fall.
And yet they fall across my step.
I found the chapter you’d begun
to erase,
a yeoman weeping
onto his wife’s side of the bed.
More, an overboard bottle
among utensils,
message meticulous.
And more—
I’m still that hopeful, that herring
dark as a fool’s tongue on your plate.
Michael Simon is an editor in New York. His poetry and prose have appeared in Atlas Review, Best New Poets 2013, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, Epiphany, and elsewhere. He is currently obsessed with John Morris’s Londinium.
