Patrick Morrissey

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.