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Poetry

The Disappearing Sonnet

(Tima Miroshnichenko)

“Cicadas, dirty oil, dogs, Venus, gloves/clouds, manholes, fled storms, black notes, harmonies/float indiscriminate as my head throbs/then disappear on the next wisp of breeze”

1

A mournful elegy I’d best avoid

I’d rather speak of leek potato soup.

Before I stare into a stark, blank void

I’d sooner sing of goopy, viscous scoops.

 

Hubble showed that galaxies are soup

triggering star-form waves, same way we burp

yet don’t know why stars’ heat-pair stops abrupt

as flesh that falls apart to sudden dirt.

 

Nonbeing, it’s not scary, no more than

a pencil stick figure becoming faint

then fainter, then an invisible man

who wishes he’d at least been drawn with paint.

 

These fretful words were written to recede

as sacrificial beasts were born to bleed.

 

2

The cold bleak air has bit my lips, has chilled

even my armpits, though sweat nestles there.

Weather’s a paradox.  Distemper fills

each crevice of my clothes, socks, underwear

 

with steam that’s made from rain, now vapor trace

made wet spots that will dry and disappear

leaving a musty kiss on thigh, chest, face

sweet slobbery lips of love vanished to air.

 

True love embraced me to pick my pocket

pick my brain’s locks, steal the jars of fig jam

I’d hid there, and left a silver locket

smelling of faded pine and Easter ham

 

made from a sacrificial beast’s black blood.

 

3

Behold me as you would a shrinking hole

into which mud falls from a nameless source

becoming less while trying to grow whole

as optimism tries to outwit force.

 

Its wet spots soon will dry and disappear

just like this poem, which isn’t meant to last

the paradox of negative space, the fear

that we are nothing but a vanished past

 

the day we’re born. Still, magpies brought fine bones

and other trash to that hole, just in time

to make its gap their temporary home

this former pit of desiccated slime.

 

4

I lost a glove and ransacked every room

thinking it might lie in a foreign street

neglected, tires disfiguring its form

or tossed inside a store’s lost and found crate

 

becoming less while trying to grow whole.

I am an animist, and objects live

for me, they have a presence and a soul

and unlike us, they most exist to give

 

their substance so that others thrive.

Therefore I mourn that glove, each day

knowing it misses me, somewhere, alive.

 

5

I’ve lost my way on a hot foreign street

without a map, euphoric and afraid.

I’m dodging open manholes with my feet

but if I fall inside, at least there’s shade

 

as in the underworld, where drear undead

are there to meet you, pallid but distinct

dispensing wisdom while projecting dread

dissipating more with each word they speak.

 

One reaches out her hand, and there’s the glove

I lost some years ago, breathing sighs of love.

 

6

Why do I cross out half the lines I wrote

perfectly good ones, with keen metaphors

now banished to a netherworld, floating like ghosts

of dead invention, gods I turned to whores

 

through sheer neglect, pure skin pockmarked with sores

begging to be restored, black notes falling

from off-white sheets of unfinished scores

disintegrating iambs with no ring?

 

Deep in the manhole, I begin to sing.

 

7

There’s time for me to voice two brisk quatrains.

My steady tenor echoes in the shaft

while onlookers peer down, braving the rain

concluding that I’m full insane, or daft.

 

Three or four harmonize, else counterpoint

aware this song can’t last.  They reach to raise

me up, dazed and besmirched as if anointed

by God’s dirty oil.  A lone voice prays.

 

8

Dogs bark as crimson light slices rooftops.

The barking stops, leaving blue-gray silence

and slate raindrops from a departed squall.

Venus, the wandering star, makes her presence

 

known, then slips behind a cloud to undress.

Like her, I’m chaste and shy, afraid to shed

my clothes, lest underneath lies nothingness.

 

9

A lone cicada, slender as its name

that only lives four fast weeks above ground

springs from fresh grass to drink deep from an elm

having spent seventeen years underground.

 

This curious bug first lives its burial

as afterlife, which for it comes before.

 

10

Turn out the lights and let the streetlamp shine

the one that makes the darkness darker

and renders its own halo more sublime

turning the glossy, fresh-clipped hedges starker

 

ensuring I’ll toss and turn, awake till dawn.

 

11

Cicadas, dirty oil, dogs, Venus, gloves

clouds, manholes, fled storms, black notes, harmonies

float indiscriminate as my head throbs

then disappear on the next wisp of breeze.

 

12

Dawn flings ten blackbirds

night gathers them in its shawl

and flings them straight back.

 

13

Beautiful couplet

you’re unbreakable.

 

14

One line.  Why bother?.

 

Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.

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