Justin Vicari
Their Riddling Prayers
Marble-veined
Polaroids, murdered film smiles. Wing-
backs, brass spittoons, silkscreened partitions
where nightingales slow-fade from pleated hanging gardens.
I'm the bronze mask, eyeless and tongueless,
nailed to the wall of a hotel lobby in the east
where a depressed poet drank one summer,
uncrumpling his dollar bills to look at me, and drink, and muse. . .
What happened to time travel?
Where is the out-of-body mantra?
What outlaw will pirate the psychic sex channel
for us?
Century with your wish-list of inventions,
your infant joy at coincidence, your despairing armies:
all of it, sold out.
See the lousy hand we're dealt.
Won't it ever die away, the I I sickened from
while still young? I thought life had subdued
its scarlet-fever outbreaks in me,
like a white explorer shackling natives to a tree.
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Justin Vicari:
Recent/forthcoming credits include: Interim, Rhino, Eclipse, Slant,
Spillway, Disquieting Muses, Gin Bender, Third Coast, Poetry Motel,
Film Quarterly, Memorious, Stirring, Jump Cut, and other reviews.
One of my poems was nominated for a 2005 Pushcart. email: Justin Vicari
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