PATHÉTIQUE
On Delta Flight 435 you farted and the guy behind us
threw up.
I hear a Bread song and suddenly you appear.
The Pleasure Faire (pre-Bread band).
Love is Always Seventeen (David Gates post-Bread album).
Nature is never evident, nature never revealed,
you making it and then taking a nap while wearing it.
I know you lie when you look at me directly,
getting in there somewhere
in the knitting structure,
an argument so old, it was never even born.
And when the penultimate one goes
penultimate is such a good word, it should just mean the end.
Penultimate should just mean the end.
We were the first people to receive colonics.
Later on, we called ourselves Colonics Babies,
but at the time, they just told us
about a procedure where they would clean
our bowels with streams of water.
In my letters, I would call you xexxy,
which is pronounced “sassy,”
but means the same as “sexy.”
Hallucinating emotional labyrinths
my memory touched apart. Out of roses
we came red.
A childhood trained on looking into rooms
I acquiesced into.
It’s only something you walk through
to put away your keys.
biography
DAN MAGERS’s first book of poems, Partyknife, is published by Birds, LLC. He is co-founder and co-editor of Sink Review, an online poetry journal, founder and editor of Immaculate Disciples Press, a handmade chapbook press focused on poetry and visual arts collaborations. He lives in Brooklyn.