Eratio

Eratio Issue 17

 

 

 

Three Poems

 

by Nicolette Wong

 

 

 

 

To Call This Honest House

 

 

To call this honest house, spill dark sand

over its failings.  Torque the warbling

caution I would have swallowed

more graciously than he circles our lives.

 

Everywhere the image scrawls a lasso

in search of answers.  Nothing blots the night;

our bodies cast shadows on what façade

has cast itself and crooned our sleep.

 

End of culprit—enormity soils my glee

outside the door.  Somewhere, a defiant god

spits the tepid for the molten, scalds

my name to cook a fog death.

 

 

 

 

Celebration

 

 

Going to my next life to sell sprinklers

and tango to the musicians of Jacob.

 

Where are jokers and hoaxers

as the statue in chain, a green rupture

 

from the holy land—treacherous,

with the voice of an origami shredded

 

for early celebration.  We drink

the tinkling, the improbable census

 

of time.  A foothold, cooed

by the flurry or the sack.

 

On the sauté border: a bridge,

cars branded with last night’s lava

 

from unfinished permutations.  That wants

to skew my ammunition, center of dome.

 

The door will not bend to the shine

of bandoneon, bleached

 

on my bright day.  It must come

with an extinguisher at his side.

 

He might then—an alliance—

swallow the voice in its wake.

 

 

 

 

The Arsonists

 

 

We make the mistake of clipping moss to our throats.  Burgundy: a god flexing its temporal eye for a mile.  Contradictory, like a forked violin, spiking melodic concussion down the highway.  We choke corals from the dusk.  There are traces of bats that have pierced our flowers; of caviar, swept from a musket; of a day on hopscotch and this prescience of revolting.  The nights paint an insinuated halo.  Tuck at the bell and the posts will fall.  Tuck at the hula in the gut, our marriage is felled. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nicolette Wong is a magician, dancer, and editor in chief of A-Minor

Magazine & Press.  She blogs at Meditations in an Emergency.

 

 


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