WHEN NIGHT WOULDN'T END
Livio Farallo
candles in the
night are not humpbacked
stars
dancing like an old lecher’s
eyes. they
tell
you
of candied apples split
by e. coli;
assemblies of electric motors
corrupted by
salmonella, spark by spark.
and i remember
some
darkness, once, but
not the
details. maybe a bicycle wheel
spinning
faster than
mercury: maybe the rhythm of
a
horse
and
carriage
in shadow.
i recall
the sky fell without
a dead
bird to warn me
and i was listening to trees
cracking
in schizophrenia.
the hours were a small
glove that slipped over a barn
while a woman pedaled a sewing machine that dropped
a tight
sweater over the sun. now
the
cellar crawls up
the stairs, noisy
as an old
movie and though a streetlight grows red in the face
trying to brighten a crumbling church,
an unlit night
rumbles past. the smoke of countless bison on
the great plains.
TUNDRA WINTER WITH NO ONE'S WIFE
Livio Farallo
i swept the floor
with a long-handled
truncheon. the kind
that’s
meant to keep you warm way past
the
season of
winter. and the spiders cried. and
the
gray sky
illuminated motes that were
flamingoes
flying in formation. the mailwoman
claimed farmland
was an invention to feed
scarecrows that fell out of the sun. and rain
was a holiday and
she wasn’t
ready to break a bone in stampede.
i tried to smile.
to twist time so
that every minute could blow
home
no
matter where it came from
while breakfast sugars laid like
blankets
up to my chin;
while
crayons, thin as dali’s elephants,
sped down the road
in a blister of frigid
napalm. i disguised
my-
self to resemble
the
soft
sound a dying snake would make
as it circled
the soil and blew kisses without answer.
it wasn’t the
afternoon yet. it wasn’t a ghost becoming sister.
my heart sank like a bag of sand
and desdemona was
nowhere to be found.
Livio Farallo is co-editor of Slipstream. His work has appeared in The Cardiff Review, The Cordite
Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Blotter, North Dakota Quarterly and elsewhere.