Kill Your Darlings
for Christopher Moltisanti
You know who had an ark? Not me, I'm staying
in the flood with the carnivores
whose reptilian sludge our sportscars burn.
Away they go, the saved,
horse and horse, bitch
and stud, to write the winners' script
I only imitated, flannelboard child.
The teacher of little saints
didn't give us the drowned characters to play with —
the extinct lizards, the doe with damaged womb
who's useless to be paired off.
I could have gone
west with the raven
who never returned, traded bullets'
rattle for keystrokes
in a screenwriters' room,
spilled names instead of my own
salty tides rising up in my throat.
I don't imagine much anymore
but when I saw the tunnel
through my shot spleen, and came back,
I knew why the dinosaurs didn't follow the new god
to higher ground. Held each other under
the indicting waters.
Now I'm taking my father's oath. An ink-
black beak taps the window.
Now it's gone.
Commendatore
for Tony Soprano
Let me go mad again
so the lilting signorina
will reappear with my window breeze —
her bodice half undone, the sun in her arms;
let her not turn so soon
into a white sheet winding
on the doctor's clothesline.
Let me cease to breathe
the bloody air
the recorded coloratura sweetens
over the ruined amphitheater
of lobster shells;
let an embrace be an embrace
of men, and not the sling
that drains the knocked cow,
till it is time.
My arms are tired
from all these bones.
Let me meet the bear
in the night with a cigar
by my leaf-strewn pool, or under
the sooty howl of the turnpike
at a pay phone
where no one can trace the number
of his claws.
Let me choke on my mother's
milk, and her unsold home
where photos in an empty room
of my dead father make my eyes roll back
like fixed Lotto balls.
This time, when she laughs
at my face-scraping fall
down her front steps, let me not rise
for her heart moves no more
than the porch's aluminum awning.
And when I fall
let the migrant feathers scatter.
There's no one whose death I haven't wished for.
Jendi Reiter is the author of five poetry books and chapbooks, most recently Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022); the story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press/New Millennium Writings, 2018); and the novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016), which won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction. Their novel Origin Story is forthcoming from Saddle Road Press in 2024. They are the editor of the writing resource site WinningWriters.com.
Twitter: @JendiReiter
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