MAYDAY

Verge
by William Cordeiro

Contributed By:

Icebound by John Henry Twachtman (1889) from the Art Institute of Chicago

 

You walk beside the crick as light is rushing 
off. Afterglow molts lavender and saffron.
Each house you pass is built of falling dust.
Here wandered troops of savage mastodons,

now birth-worn earthtones scintillate and wane.
Gold cloudbanks ulcer. 
                                                     Day tips over rapids.
Distant edges dwindle grain by grain.     
A long-dead starshine jumps the eyes’ spark gaps

to grace the culvert marked by one white heron
whose neck’s a question mark. 
                                                         The town obscures
and dims to errant gleams. Just out of hearing, 
slow willows wrestle to decode the current. 

Beneath a streetlamp’s orb, the first flake gambols. 
Then, thicker, more ghost up. Each crystal swivels, 
swoons, 
                                 lifts off. 
                                                The snowfall holograms
a whiteout of all time. 
                                                                   A frozen river.                                                    

Ice snaps above a puddle like a photograph.    
Light reinvents itself as dark caresses 
dark somewhere beyond the looping paths      
of suburbs. 

                                     You are a blizzard. Just confess it.                     

 

WILL CORDEIRO has work published in AGNI, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, The Threepenny Review, THRUSH, and elsewhere. Will won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award for Trap Street and is co-author of Experimental Writing: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Will co-edits Eggtooth Editions and teaches at Northern Arizona University.                  




Further Reading

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LOVE IS A BLACK HOLE by Chuck Richardson

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(reviewed by Tony Whedon)

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