Always / Zyanya
Not a day or night without a train;
not a dream, either
those lucid blues where I'm strung out,
punching cardstock tickets because
of course
I wouldn't conduct -
awake or asleep
it's eighty degrees in the apartment in March
where it always snows on my
Birthday
the ground bare and brown
by windows open and noxious
and knocked up with sunlight
shining down on Mother
who is just bones.
and alive or gleaming
every dickhead with a pen-prick screaming
global warming, see!
See!
She's melting.
Tell that! to the hand on the brakes
squealing on rusted tracks through
Edison, the hell mouth, through
Albany, the frigid capital, through
Potsdam, the home:
Ask him! if he's burning any
bridges,
turning dry grass to tinder with the sparks
he throws:
on paths as blemished
as ego
in swamp water.
No,
not a day
and certainly not a night without the howl of steel
on time and lagging:
a thinny sound across vast white plains,
across the industrial debutante reveal
or down staircases made of champagne -
rolling on down the tracks
like skin worn against the flood
they flayed you
for.
Well tell 'em hello for me,
say everything is fine.
say
you'll write the response
and catalogue his trail in the margins of
newspapers
unstacked
unsorted -
Tell him!
there's room upstairs between
scraps of song lyrics,
bites of diatribes you forgot
amongst the rhythms built to keep
current with stripped
cogs.
If nothing else, then just break
his fucking fingers off -
they're as brittle as bark
and wet from grease.
Break every dial and lever
and hook while you're at it
but still that sound
tracing a path in fractured sleep from
Newport News to Charlotte
to the missing land of the
Azteca.
Because it's not for wanting to stop
it's that he's roots and rooted
from the brutal,
scorched Earth
(who is just bones)
to his leathered
palms.
He tried!
he tried and probed through decades of
sand and cicadas
and when he came up for air, there was just enough dew
to leave his lips dry.
I know it will come to port when it's
damn good and hoarse.
I will voice a dwindling summer stable
in my bedroom,
as at last he'll hold that brake before front porches
walled in by glass braced against wind
and lye
and hear him call back:
"Count your star gazing on
both hands and find how
often they were
city lights.”
Life of Pi in a Rundown Theater
No sweeter cadence
than her feet, softly
on centuries of floor boards
or the creak of bed springs
as she climbs in
lifting me from sleep
to ask if
for her
I would make my body a canvas
and I yaw
like leaves in the yard -
Please.
Ethan Shantie is a poet and musician living in Potsdam, NY. His work has previously been published in New York States of Mind Magazine and in the 2013 chapbook Poems for Danielle Steel's Purple Prose. He plays drums and yells in Sunflo'er (Magnetic Eye Records), and gets paid to talk with his dad on the radio.