Peacock Online Review
Publishing innovative writing, quarterly.
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It’s hard for any little fortune.
It’s hard to appear special
when there is no bell
within which to chime.
This sad fate of each small achievement,
it is too late now for any lasting recognition.
I don’t own anything, really
books don’t count
happiness is not conditional
the adjunct is just a thing
added to another thing, but not essential to its being.
That’s the kick.
That’s the hard way, in which
I have always learned.
But I’m not a mercenary, not a soldier, not a fortune, not one who sells insurance, nor stock, nor
homes to new families, nor anything
truly tenable.
There isn’t a living in these words.
There’s no reason why it is so.
Our sons are mostly destined to be our opposites
and partly so our replicas.
This is not only my face, not my only face.
This is how I say.
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This is how to tie a fishing hook. This is how to thread it through. This is the oar and this, the oarlock. This is how to row a boat. This is the motor and how you turn it over. This is how you throttle up to 2500 RPM. This is how you navigate by compass, how you draw your course. This is where the fish are, or should be. This is how you wait. This is how you set the hook and play the fish until its energy exhausted. This is how you strike it unconscious and remove the hook from its mouth. This is how the fillet knife cuts from here to here, how you then remove its innards, save its roe. This is how you portion it into steaks. This isn’t poetry. This is how to be a real man.
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When the entire world is an if then or what now
its smaller units instruct you outside yourself
so to say do this, this way
in an uninhabited city that is your own body
without cars or pedestrians window-shopping
and buzzing through it.
When the entire world is smaller than
it used to be, because we are all closer now
and less afraid, it is neighborly.
The motion of the life, when touching
the afterlife, is the motion of the poem.
The ghosts this poem is written for
are the ghosts of the poem.
They are beside us in the funny mirror
whispering instructions in our ears.
When the entire world is beautiful, they say,
it is because you see a rose
and not the world you live in.
Everything is not what we assume,
is not accurate or right or wrong
and this is the problem; the body in this world
moves between challenges and finds its way
to that other world in which the ghosts say.
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The rope is tied in knots and used to moor the ship. This is how I learned about lengths of rope and then I read the definition of the rope and wanted to climb it. This was reading the poem and making knots to mark those points in it to which I would one day return. This is an aid to memory. The Indian rope trick is a snake, which is a metaphor for desire. Where he is, stars are the only streetlights—that’s fact, not a metaphor—and that’s fine, he can navigate by them, and does. The Navy is so far away, but the sea is right there wrapping around everything that supports him, like armor, like an exoskeleton. Like an old man has at the center of himself each diamond of knowledge collected along the way. Each jewel inhabits him, as it does all of us, like poetry.
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Vessels clot and burst, every bone
brittles eventually
and breaks, the sky we all see
is still that same sky from which
zeroes came down
like warm tropical rain
onto American soil and the same sky
under which all of us were born.
Sunlamps, however, aren’t the sun
or his son,
though to be revolved around
admired for his brightness is like it.
And the day’s sun,
falling, far off, from sky to land,
muddies the mind so no new banks
of bulging green are made.
Time is this body’s master and bored
with its plaything.
The body, like even the greatest empires,
like anything in nature, rises
only until it must naturally decline.
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I don’t know if being in a boat alone at sea is like an ease of mind or if one syllable is enough to equate a final breath. I don’t know what it is like to simply await proximate death but I understand the desire it quells to live. Why wake to discover and discover again what lapses have occurred or seek exhaustion in each experience anew. There is comfort in the place and presence of cedar walls and cedar trees. Lured, as he is by the promise of a syllable, he becomes one terminus of a larger metaphor. The raft, it ferries us across. The object with which he is compared is beyond his recognizing. His likeness extends only a little way, but between him and the writing as if all his hereditary privilege were a far-off universe, a little light in the sky we see at dusk, that likeness, that light reveals its magnitude.