Madonna on the Burnt Pancake
I leave my body on
Sunday mornings
while people wash
their sticky finger
sof post-service pancake
residue and guilt
over the sin of consumption
(or of not enough consumption).
And I baptize my
fear in the sea.
Hold my hands on
either side and swing
me like a child. What if
I’m of no interest
to the world when I
grow up?
I may just drown
now and prove
to the pancake mourners
that fear is arbitrary.
I’d like to put
all my chips on red,
decompose in salt
Water--maybe
one day, my atoms
will rain over
rusted wheelbarrows.
But I am so hungry.
A Love Supreme
John Coltrane
after a near O.D. he
composed a four part suite
to commemorate his spiritual awakening
(thank god for heroin it does great things to jazz artists)
called A Love Supreme.
This is what I learned from a love supreme:
1. I’ll never awaken like Coltrane so there is no
use considering heroin.
2. SKIP THIS AD IN 6 SECONDS
3. Humans looked out at the sun god
up at the sky god &
down at the screen god
is the result of some
historical fear
of loneliness.
Reconciling with Deleted Files
I knew how to dismantle the
radiator from watching YouTube
repairment videos.
You can
reverse engineer pretty much
anything if you start at the end
& rewind step-by-step.
I tore it from the wall & found
a shoebox
full of postcards from
the underworld.
I put them in the blue
recycling bin.
I tried
to understand what
happens to something that
loses its meaning.
I made a puddle of
tap water in the winter behind my
apartment. I dropped the radiator
in & watched it freeze.
M. Wright has recently been published in The Rising Phoenix Review, Maudlin House, Barely South Review, and (forthcoming in) Temenos Journal. He is the winner of Weisman Art Museum's Poetry ArtWords and was awarded second place in the Into the Void Poetry Competition. In 2017, M. will be one of the 24 featured poets in the Saint Paul Almanac's Impressions series. More: wrightm.com.