Jonathan Weinert

A Lean-to at the End of the Galaxy
June 25, 2017 Weinert Jonathan

A Lean-to at the End of the Galaxy

 

You fire a fiction deep into my brain
By the dishwasher door gaping to accept
This evening’s dirtied plates.
It detonates.

I am unrecognizable to myself
As I am unknown to you
And the shockwave from the wordblast
Drives out all other sound.

I’ve often written myself a place,
Out back, in the scrap woods,
Among devoured pines
And slack pools red with leaf rot

But I have no home
Among the otters’ dens
Littered with the leavings
Of their frigid dinners.

Although it’s colder there
There’s time to build
A shelter out of limbs and sticks
Through which the wind can come from outer space

And brush my scrambled face.
The stove clock ticks its way
Toward zero. I must be careful
Through the tripwires.

Moonlight slips a floor of glass
Between the doorway and the bed
And when I walk on it
It cracks.

Jonathan Weinert is the author of three books of poems: A Slow Green Sleep, winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize; In the Mode of Disappearance, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize; and Thirteen Small Apostrophes, a chapbook. He is co-editor, with Kevin Prufer, of Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W. S. Merwin. Jonathan lives and works in Stow, Massachusetts.