Five Poems
Thomas Fucaloro
Someday I’ll Learn to Hide my Cigarettes Better Haibun
As they floated across the room and shipwrecked right into the drowning of betrayal, each precious puff, a secret held in greying deception.
Tobacco clogs the pipes they say; flooding always reveals the truths we are trying to hide behind the sink; to make sure the mirror is not watching.
As the cigarettes floated across the ocean of the apartment the sink kept singing tobacco/mosaic/water/resolve.
She picks up a pack
My mother lights one up, then
She lights me up too
Falling apart through the tears
My age is wearing on me
and I don’t look a day older
than the younger me wanting
death
Am I wearing too much black,
Hot Topic had a going out of irony sale
and I bought 2 of everything
just to prove my thesis
I remember a time I mattered,
now you matter. That is a hard pill
to throw away because I have swallowed
so much that I thought was there to help me
You matter more than the brain’s refrain
of an afterlife promenade and all the aid
you can muster into a carton and pour
like orange juice over vodka filled ice cubes
Falling apart through the years
my focus is the prominent lines
of your skin, your smile maps
and creates
I’ve never wrecked a car
but here is a list of things
I have wrecked
The inside, how it crumbles only to assemble bulbous
The shattering, the time we often spoke
The relationship with my sister, how I’m only a minute
This sinister, it is no longer the scarf I wear around my lid
Every other relationship rhyming with pun-fealthy
My understanding of math and how it can turn a wheel
My perception of what the body wants and how it can keep and how it can hold
Old bags of popcorn, 4a.m., vodka stained teeth like enamel nails chewed through
The meaning of everything I learned at the age of 8
The sometimes I could never turn into always
Telling you to turn the wheel
The nurse comes in and says it is time to check my blood
A man brings a satchel from a journey he will never reveal
Someone builds a compass from old banjos and gusto
Everyone is smiling but everyone is smiling too much
They kneel covering their eyes in prayer
They have their feet cleansed river before setting sail on soul
A woman in a long black gown holding a dead-man’s-sickle hands a child a flower
Peninsula bear entertains kids;
officials suspicious of the motives
I would be suspicious too
You never know what a gaggle of
Entertained kids or adults can lead too
Especially concerning something they don’t understand
Our intellect limits how we can communicate with those whose intellect differs
The winner of a performance grant from the Staten Island Council of the Arts and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Thomas Fucaloro has been on six national slam teams. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School and is a co-founding editor of Great Weather for Media and NYSAI press. He is an adjunct professor at Wagner College and BMCC where he teaches world lit and advanced creative writing. He teaches poetry at Prison Writes. His latest chapbook, “There is Always Tomorrow” was released in 2017 by Mad Gleam Press. Since 2016, Thomas has helped in building a community of poets in Staten Island, focusing on making poetry accessible to all, either though the Life Vest Poetry Slam, The Who Needs Healing? Reading Series, or the free workshops offered at Staten Island Libraries and other various orgs.
