By: Edison Angelbello
Red | | Leaves
Red
or yellow
leaves
for Floridians
mean
you’re no longer
home you’re out
of your lane rolling down
pitchforking veins
toward the edge
what you thought was
the end what is really
a border
where they want to put a
wall
between you and me
and our mani-colored
leaves
Southern leaves
Northern leaves
Mankind leaves
yes we leave
nos vamos I imagine
mi abuelo saying
cuando su numero
fue llamado I imagine
also my dad
quien no ya sabía que
siempre
nos vamos we are
leaving we are
leaves or the
rain falling
off of these
leaves we are
at once human beings
being and human
beings leaving we are
humans beginning
to leave even as
we’ve just begun
to live this is
perhaps
our most accurate description
drops of water
in a water park
or on this leaf bowing
with death
like drying
wood or bowing
to death like a pianist
finished tapping life
into lifeless keys so far
from the bough
is this leaf so close
to leaving
is this drop
slipping or sliding
dripping
drooping
dropping into
pools undistinguished onto
beds of grass
of dew
where a fellow droplet
waits for the sun
to rise waits
patiently
to vaporize
waits / then
Leaves
Sonnet Spoken to a Mountain
You ask me what your funeral was like.
I tell you it was like today.
How sky
bruised blue to purple, dipped to black like one
long sunset captured, time-lapsed down to seconds.
That first second of your death came clear
through phone to ear, but I was static.
I
was what replaces sound—what should have said
[ ] but failed, fell silent, disappeared into
your pristine, washed-out Windows background of
an early death.
And now
I am that man
inside your laptop screen who, stunted by
a single snap of self-made gunshot
camera shutter,
stands mid-stride ascending this
unmoving Himalayan heaven of you.
A Portrait of Your Corpse as an Out-of-Commission Baseball
Like my twelve-year-old self
stumbling upon a soggy, beat-up baseball in the grass,
I want to tear into this waterlogged leather lump of you.
I want to find what lies beneath
the heavy wooden top
of your too-early casket,
to see what rubber core
once beat inside your chest
and made you zing and pop and whir
when hit or caught or thrown.
So I widen the gash,
jab my thumb deep into flesh
and peel back the cowhide cover—
two strips stitched so tight together
I never wondered what they were hiding.
You are yarn and string
and nothing but. How hard
you must’ve been hit,
mummied outer-coat
like matted hair atop your
batted ball brain. I
am a forensic investigator.
Or an overstepping
undertaker who can’t help but
unravel you, your cover slips
like silk nightgowns
off naked bodies,
and your yards of yarn
unspool at my feet
as I yank at your
strands like puppet strings,
and you’re alive once more.
I reach your core, cut into
your rubber innards, and make
my diagnosis. You are not dead-
ball era. You are or should be alive
as a catch—a compressed cork
clapping between the gloves of two friends
one whole field apart.
Instead, you are here in my sterile white
morgue of a page
waiting for me to let you go.
Edison is a student, writer, and filmmaker who hails from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and currently studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He loves investing in the power poetry wields to recuperate life's losses.
Comments