Experimental Early Summer Monday Holiday in Two Cities

1.

The motors of the sun in full grind.
Human cascade, sandals, hair, bees, beers, devices.
When everything we wear is a little too short, no
radio song buzzes quite like tomorrow. Out in the blonde dust,
I seek lemon trees as if I might actually find one.
(This is how I live now: on the left side of the inside
of all possible meanings in perpetual translation.)
As you’d expect, I receive the sympathy and envy of passersby
in three-quarter time and with mitigated equilibrium.
I’ve always found my impossibilities
quite easily, as if they were graphically designed
and strategically placed not in the broad rivers of thinking
but in those tiny rivulets that depart like greenblue veins
from the brain’s ever-unwinding mindstream.

2.

The breaking point of the clouds on full display,
I’m washed away by my other’s overflow,
all the others and their camels’ backs, hammers taken to them
(This is how I live now: on the wrong side of the outside
of all impossible meanings in finite confusion.)
As you’d expect, I don’t receive half the empathy I emanate,
but who could blame them for it – I feel them for it.
I’ve always found my possibilities in the puddles, when the party’s over,
devices designed to be deleted, ideas conceived to be overwritten.
Conclusions come, sinking riverboats on the mindstream,
much like confidence in its boisterous strength,
“I know” and “I will” so “I am,” as if no knowledge no intention, no existence.

 

Steven and Benjamin Ostrowski are father and son, and have together published a chapbook (Seen/unseen, from Cervena Barva Press) and a full-length book of poems (Penultimate Human Constellation, from Tolsun Books). They’ve also published collaborative poems in The American Journal of Poetry, weirderary, and Blue Muse. Steven is widely published and is a professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. Benjamin is a publishing poet and a Ph.D candidate at Carnegie Mellon University.

Jennifer Matthews’ poetry has been published in Nepal by Pen Himalaya and locally by the Wilderness Retreat Writers Organization, Midway Journal, The Somerville Times, Ibbetson Street Press and Boston Girl Guide. Jennifer was nominated for a poetry award by the Cambridge Arts Council for her book of Poetry Fairy Tales and Misdemeanors. Her songs have been released nationally and internationally and her photography has been used as covers for a number of Ibbetson Street Press poetry books and has been exhibited at The Middle East Restaurant, 1369 Coffeehouses, Sound Bites Restaurant in Somerville and McLean Hospital.