5 poems
STATIONS OF THE CROSS
At school, we
learned the cruelty
by heart—
his anguished face
and the supporting
players, pale
in the cloistered
dark, lined up
in stunned relief—
a story
we can’t stop
telling.
APART
You hear it
before you
see it, low
end rattling
the chassis
loose, heavy
sound slowly
rolling it-
self apart.
•
Screaming, she
buries her face, he
throws up his hands
and swings around
as if to pull it all
down, Samson
in the temple, a few
pedestrians picking
their way now
among the ruins.
•
Excavators’ sharp
elbows swivel inside
a cloud of dust where
a building once was.
NOTES
Daylight slants through
the shades, stripes laid down
on the floor, fallen dark
anthurium leaves
not one thing but another.
•
Just a Gigolo
a hollow inside
the song, the standard
stretched to shadow
itself, a handful
of notes
hanging on air.
•
Blinking into
the wind: is that
water’s shadow
on water or
a cormorant fishing
just off shore?
SLEEPER AWAKE
clouds’ massy
shadows marble
gray water, a
storm passing
over the dreamer’s
face, distances
swept by
a hem of light
•
midnight, lid
of the city’s
every eye
seems to drop
but one, a
neon sign
blinking at
this far corner
MATINEE
Once the movie’s
through, what’s left
is the projector’s
pale humming
square, sparks
of dust suspended
in the afterglow,
a hundred thousand
little pictures
coiled away now
in the dark, waiting
to be unspooled
again another
time, another place,
reeling suddenly
back to life
as we stumble out
over each other,
blinking one by one
into the light.
Patrick Morrissey is the author of The Differences (Pressed Wafer, 2014), World Music (Verge Books, 2017), and Light Box (Verge Books, forthcoming in 2021). His writing has recently appeared in The Nation, Bennington Review, Chicago Review, Volt, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.